166 ANCIENT FLINT IMPLEMENTS CHAP. ix. 



to enable us to determine the relative age of these strata. In 

 the Bedford gravel, last alluded to, some remains of Hippopo 

 tamus major and Elephas antiquus have been discovered, 

 and an assemblage of land and freshwater shells of recent 

 species, but not precisely the same as those of Biddenham. 



One step at least we gain by the Bedford sections, which 

 those of Amiens and Abbeville had not enabled us to make. 

 They teach us that the fabricators of the antique tools, and 

 the extinct mammalia coeval with them, were all post-glacial, 

 or, in other words, posterior to the grand submergence of 

 Central England beneath the waters of the glacial sea. 



Flint Implements in a Freshwater Deposit at Hoxne in 

 Suffolk. 



So early as the first year of the present century, a re 

 markable paper was communicated to the Society of An 

 tiquaries by Mr. John Frere, in which he gave a clear 

 description of the discovery at Hoxne, near Diss, in Suffolk, 

 of flint tools of the type since found at Amiens, adding at the 

 same time good geological reasons for presuming that their an 

 tiquity was very great, or, as he expressed it, beyond that of 

 the present world, meaning the actual state of the physical 

 geography of that region. ( The flints,' he said, ' were 

 evidently weapons of war, fabricated and used by a people 

 who had not the use of metals. They lay in great numbers at 

 the depth of about twelve feet in a stratified soil which was dug 

 into for the purpose of raising clay for bricks. Under a foot 

 and a half of vegetable earth was clay seven and a half feet 

 thick, and beneath this one foot of sand with shells, and under 

 , this two feet of gravel, in which the shaped flints were found 

 generally at the rate of five or six in a square yard. In the 

 sandy beds with shells were found the jaw bone and teeth of 

 an enormous unknown animal. The manner in which the 



