250 EARLY MAN IN BRITAIN. [CHAP. vui. 



flake which apparently had never been used. They were 

 imbedded in the upper ferruginous portion of the angular 

 detritus, and evidently had been dropped upon the 

 surface-soil of the period, and not transported by water. 

 On searching the shingle we found only one water-worn 

 flint-pebble, which possibly may have been washed out 

 of the angular detritus. It is therefore probable that the 

 presence of flint and chert in that neighbourhood is 

 due to their transport by man. 



Encouraged by these results, we resolved to explore 

 the submarine forest in the nearest bay to the east, close 

 to Minehead. It there consists of oak, ash, alder, and 

 hazel, which grow on a blue clay, full of rootlets that 

 thicken considerably seawards. The blue clay in its 

 lower part is full of angular fragments of Devonian 

 rocks, which, as at Porlock, constitute a land-wash, and 

 not a shingle. At the point between tides,- where the 

 angular fragments began to appear, splinters were found 

 which had been struck off by the hand of man in the 

 manufacture of implements. They were imbedded in 

 a ferruginous band as at Porlock, and occurred as 

 deep as one foot from the surface of the bed. We dug 

 in several other spots without finding any other traces 

 of man. 



In both these localities it is clear that man had been 

 living on the old land- surf ace before it was submerged, 

 and that the remains of his handiwork had been dropped 

 in the angular detritus which Mr. Godwin -Austen be- 

 lieves to be subaerial and glacial. 



From these facts we may infer that man was living 

 in this region during the time that a dense forest over- 

 shadowed a large portion of what is now the Bristol 

 Channel, and before the deposit of the blue freshwater 



