J5T. 80.] J. W. HULKE. 365 



J. W. Hulke l to J. Prestwich. 



10 OLD BURLINGTON STREET, LONDON, W., 17th May 1892. 



MY DEAR PRESTWICH, Warm thanks for your papers on 

 Eaised Beaches and on Late Post-Glacl. Submergence, which 

 I have read and read again with very great interest. The vari- 

 ability and fragmentary preservation of these relatively recent 

 beds have for me been great difficulties in getting a good grasp 

 of their time sequence. 



I wish our old friend Mansel-Pleydell had been able to give 

 a more detailed account of his discovery some two years ago of 

 elephant remains in a sand-bed which he sketched to me. 2 



I saw many years ago a molar of Elephas (from the narrowness 

 of its plates I thought perhaps E. antiquus) taken from the Gravel 

 capping the chalk-cliff at Freshwater, I. Wight, close to the 

 " Battery." When I was last at Brook, I. Wight, a few years 

 since, nearly all of the bed under Gravel on cliff-top by the chine, 

 where I had formerly got hazel-nuts, &c., had disappeared by 

 foundering of cliff. The waste of cliffs on the S. coast of I. 

 Wight within my memory has been remarkable. A good in- 

 stance of this is Shepherd's Chine. When I first knew it, some 

 25 years ago, it was a narrow gulley crossed by a plank. At 

 its opening on the beach the E. side was a nearly vertical 

 cliff of blue shales with Septaria, that I used to dig and break up 

 they occasionally yielded pterodactylian bones. Now the for- 

 merly narrow gulley is a wide open dell with sloping banks ! 



You refer to a former harbour-master at Kamsgate. There 

 was one who made quite a collection of elephants' tusks and 

 molars dredged up off the harbour, and I have myself seen E. 

 remains notably an os innominatum, dug up at low tide after 

 heavy ground-swell, between Sandown Castle and No. 1 Battery. 

 As the chalk rock is there at no great depth, these remains may 

 have come out of rubble on its top under the present sand. 



1 John Whitaker Hulke, F.K.S., President of the Eoyal College of 

 Surgeons ; born November 6, 1830 ; died February 19, 1896. 



2 Notes on the JSlephas meridionalis at Dewlish, Dorset, have been pub- 

 lished by Mr Mansel-Pleydell, 'Proc. Dorset Nat. Hist. Club,' vol. x., 1889 

 p. 1 ; and vol. xiv., 1893, p. 139. 



