166 ANCIENT FLINT IMPLEMENTS. chap. ix. 



determine the relative age of these strata. In the Bedford 

 gravel, hist alluded to, some remains o{ Hippopotamus major 

 and JSlephas antiquus have been discovered, and an assem- 

 blage of land and fresh-water 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 iis to make. 

 They teach us that the fabi'icators 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 Eno-land beneath the Avaters of the e-lacial sea. 



Flint Impjlements in a Fresh-water 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 Anti- 

 quaries by Mr. John Frere, in Avliieh he gave a clear descrip- 

 tion 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 anti- 

 quity was ver}' great, or, as he expressed it, beyond that of 

 the present world, meaning the actual state of the physical 

 geography of that region. " I'he flints," he said, "were evi- 

 dently 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 



