THE MISSING LINK 289 



knowledge of primitive man away from the caves of 

 France to the thin patch of iron-stained gravel in the 

 meadow-land of the River Ouse as it flows through the 

 Sussex weald. These remains are the first remains of a 

 man-like creature found in a Pleistocene river gravel, 

 and they exceed in interest any human remains as yet 

 known. There is now reason to hope that more such 

 remains will be discovered in similar gravels.^ 



It would be highly important were we able to 

 arrive at a satisfactory conclusion as to what age must be 

 attributed to the Piltdown jaw and skull. Did we know 

 their age their true significance as a link between man 

 and ape would be more easily estimated. The gravel 

 in which they were found contains a handful, as it were, 

 of the sweepings of the land surface of the great Weald 

 valley of Sussex of all ages and periods since the 

 emergence of the chalk from the ocean floor — an 

 immense lapse of time, amounting probably to millions 

 of years ! In this sparse and inconspicuous patch of 

 gravel we find fragments of teeth of mastodon and 

 elephant and rhinoceros of Miocene and Pliocene age ; 

 we also find bones of quite late kinds of mammals of the 

 Pleistocene period ; we also find two kinds of roughly 

 chipped flint instruments belonging the one to an earlier 

 and the other to a later age. All are mixed up together 

 . in the gravel. When we come to the question as to 



^ The human lower jaw found at Moulin-Quignon fifty years ago 



gy workmen who brought it to M. Boucher de Perthes, was dis- 



lissed after much study and examination by the most competent 



latomists at the time as being a comparatively recent specimen. 



;do not know whether it has been preserved. I have a flint imple- 



lent found with it which was given to me in 1862 by M. de Perthes 



genuine. It is a forgery, and the jaw was fraudulently buried with 



and others in order to deceive M. de Perthes and earn a pecuniary 



Jward for the forgers. 



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