iL BULLETIN OF THE LIVERPOOL MUSEUMS. 
with their making and using implements, paleolithic in form, of the rudest 
and poorest kind. 
It will be observed that the flints of “ paleolithic type” found by 
Professor Petrie on the Nile plateaux were, as he tells us, lying “ scattered 
around the centres where they were actually worked” ; while Mr. Quibell’s dis- 
coveries on the surface of the Ballas desert were in association, not only with 
the rounded flint nodules from which the implements were made, but along 
with “the chips of working.” 
I believe it is the fact that very few true paleolithic implements in 
Europe have been found on the surface unless quite recently washed out of 
beds, portions, at all events, of which are still existent. It seems an extra- 
ordinary circumstance, and to me impossible to credit, that the nodules, 
the flakes, and the implements should, notwithstanding the enormous rain- 
fall predicated by Dr. Petrie, which ploughed out the side valleys opening 
on the Nile, be found lying, even in a solitary instance, in undisturbed 
association at the present day, while the forests which sprang from the 
abundant moisture, and under whose shade the palolithic workers lived 
and hunted before the formation of the Nile Valley, and before the separa- 
tion of Europe from North Africa, along with the accumulated soil in which 
the rich vegetation grew, have all been entirely washed away. 
That we possess implements of unmistakable “ palolithic type” which 
if without history would be classed as palzolithic unhesitatingly, but which 
are incalculably younger, is a well-known fact. The flint implements from 
Abu Shahrein, in Southern Babylonia, is an instance in point. They were 
discovered in different parts of these extensive ruins on and amid the debris 
of the city, in association with terra cotta objects and a number of flakes 
intended for use as knives, together with the nodule of flint from which they had 
been struck—undoubted proof that they were made on the spot, and cannot 
be of greater age than the ruins themselves. 
The same “true paleolithic form” is apparent in the implements, 
resembling, except in material, those from the high plateaux of the Nile, 
found by Mr. Seton-Karr scattered over the surface of the country in Somali- 
land in the years 1893-96, of which a representative set has been added to 
the Mayer Collection. Dr. Gregory, of the British Museum, has been kind 
enough to examine for me the material of which they are made. He 
reports that some are of limestone, either of Upper Cretaceous or of Eocene 
age; others—and these the more numerous—of coarse, gritty quartzite, 
“probably belonging to the series of grit sandstones below the neocomian 
limestones and above the archzan series ; though he has seen no rock from 
Somaliland exactly like it”; while others are of chert, in some cases of a 
flint-like variety, whitened by exposure, from the Kocene series. 
The first collection made in 1893-4 by Mr. Seton-Karr was deseribed by 
him at the British Association meeting at Ipswich. The implements were 
‘flint chipped spear-heads, knives, and scrapers,” or, as Sir John Evans has 
described them, “broad flat flakes trimmed along the edges so as to be of 
‘le moustier type’ of M. Gabriel de Mortillet.” In 1894-5 he obtained 
several thousand more specimens . . . but “of this large number, 
however, only about 100 are really symmetrically chipped as spear-heads.” 
“T also gathered,” he says, ‘a number of cores, chips and flakes, knives and 
scrapers. The places where they abound in the district alluded to were 
invariably of one character. In the first place, the district was distinguished 
by the presence of flint nodules upon the surface, so that these ancient peoples, 
with whom this place was apparently a manufactory, had the materials ready 
to their hands. 
“T observed that they were more numerous as one approached a well or the 
river beds in which wells were dug. . . . The implements were most 
