148 SOMME VALLEY. [i860. 



cates, ending with little Kittie, rather than by any other sign. 

 The more one becomes acquainted with time, the more slippery 

 does it appear to be. I know I never seem to have enough of it 

 between one 12th of March and another, and I doubt not that it 

 is the same with you between the 1st April and the 31st March. 

 Yet we all have a few spare, or at all events a few idle or lazy, 

 hours. To aid in filling up such intervals with what I conceive 

 to be, and I trust you will find to be, pleasure and profit, and in 

 the hopes that many long years may afford you many opportuni- 

 ties, accept, my dear sister, not the enclosed microscope but the 

 microscope of which the key is enclosed, and which I will take 

 care you find at home on your return. I only wish I could have 

 presented it personally. It is one of Powell and Lealand's. I 

 have seen that they have made it with care, and I think you will 

 find it work easily and well. . . . Dearest Kate, your affection- 

 ate brother, J. PKESTWICH. 



A note -book, with sections of gravel -pits on every 

 alternate page, gives April as the date when Prestwich 

 again led several of his personal friends to the flint- 

 bearing districts of Amiens and Abbeville, the party 

 including Mr Busk, Captain Galton, and Sir John Lub- 

 bock. A host of geologists and others followed on the 

 same errand. Amongst many names may be noted 

 those of Sir R. Murchison, Professors Andrew C. Ram- 

 say, Rupert Jones, Henslow, Rogers, and Mr Henry 

 Christy. 



While the subject of this Memoir thus went back- 

 wards and forwards to the valley of the Somme, gener- 

 ally putting up for the night at his favourite quarters 

 on the way to or from Paris, at the H6tel Tete de 

 Bceuf at Abbeville, or at the H6tel du Rhin at Amiens, 

 and tabulating what of interest might have been 

 revealed by excavations during his absence, he still 

 continued to send in memoirs to the Geological Society 

 of London. Two papers are recorded in this year, one 



