54 BULLETIN OF THE LIVERPOOL MUSEUMS. 
early times bearing on these questions. Your remarks on patina as a test of 
age are extremely interesting, and I don’t remember having seen the subject 
so well treated elsewhere.” 
Professor Rupert Jones has sent me the following note :—“ March 
13th, 1900. I am delighted with your opinions and conclusions. . . . I 
have never doubted that under similar conditions of life and mental powers, 
with similar material to work upon, and with similar wants and habits, men 
have always made similar stone tools—beginning with rough work in each 
community and making better finished and more useful tools in successive 
generations as long as the tribe lasted. 
“Your last paragraphs at pp. 114-115 [ bull. II.] are especially sound and 
good. Stone tools of the same form as those referred to at page 114 are 
found also in South Africa and India—in fact are cosmopolitan.” 
Professor W. M. Flinders Petrie wrote me the following notes 
on April 10, 1900, in correction of several points in which I regret I had 
misunderstood him, or failed to convey his meaning accurately, and I gladly 
take this first opportunity for rectification :— 
“On a few points I fear I have not been quite explicit, and so you will 
pardon my noting—perhaps reiterating—them. 
“Page 112.* The association of flakes in groups, apparently as worked, is 
common on the high plateau. But that might co-exist with the denudation 
since the pluvial age, as these patches of flakes are all on level ground with 
no wash either way, and the removal of soil after a rainy age would be by 
wind and sun-crumbling. It is a different condition to flints left on soluble 
and washable strata in England ; in Egypt they are on a few inches of hard 
marl resting on solid limestone, and hence not liable to be washed over. 
“Page 111.¢ None of the regular ovoid flints of the prehistoric settle- 
ments are like the paleoliths of the high desert. The two types are quite 
distinct. 
“Page 107.{ The flint on which I base the statement about the age of 
colouring is an ovoid of the exact type of the Settlement flints, and hence 
dated to that age. But it was lost out on the desert, and so had been 
exposed to exactly the same influences as the older paleoliths, but only for 
7000 years. Of course, I should not expect any colouring on flint in graves. 
“Page 115.¢ I have found many flints deep in undisturbed Nile gravels 

*The passage is as follows :—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.” 
+ The passage Professor Petrie refers to reads :—‘*‘ Now, Mr. Quibell and Professor 
Petrie’s explorations seem to prove that the rough and rudely chipped ‘ ovoid flints,’ 
‘the common domestic implements of the New Race’ (which, as pointed out above, 
are hardly distinguishable from the ‘ palzolithic types ’ of the Ballas Desert) are 
coeval with the ‘ finest examples of such work known from any country or age.’” 
t The passage in my article here referred to runs :—‘‘ Now, some guage of the rate 
of this ‘onic tinting’ is given us by so great an authority as Professor Petrie :—‘ The 
old desert surfaces are stained dark brown by exposure during long ages, and this 
colour, varying from orange to black, is characteristic of all the flints of early age 
from this plateau. It is certain that only a faint tinge of brown is produced on flints 
that are at least 7000 years old under the like conditions; and this may give a slight 
scale of the ages that have past since flint was worked here by paleolithic man.’ ” 
$I quote the paragraph to which Professor Petrie refers :—‘‘ The only flint imple- 
ments from Egypt known to me to have yet been found embedded undoubtedly in position 
were discovered by General Pitt-Revers in the stratified, indurated, gravelly debris 
at the mouth of a wady—the Babel Moolook—near the Tombs of the Kings, which all 
geologists who know the spot, agree must have been deposited far back in pre-historic 
times.’ 
