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. 1 



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 



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

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

 missed after much study and examination by the most competent 

 anatomists at the time as being a comparatively recent specimen. 

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

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

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

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

 reward for the forgers. 

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