The Romance of a Wayside Weed. 65 



the land, a couple of hundred thousand years since. 

 Its outer surface was dulled and whitened by age, as 

 is always the case with these primaeval flint weapons ; 

 but its edge was still sharp and keen, though crusted 

 in places with a hard film of mineral deposit, and also 

 blunted here and there by use in cutting clubs and 

 reindeer bones for its savage possessor. But there 

 were no traces of rolling as in water-worn pebbles : 

 the knife was freshly disinterred. It was clear that 

 the storm had just unearthed it from beneath the sub- 

 merged forest which belts all the coast from Beachy 

 Head to Dungeness. For the forest is a post-glacial 

 deposit ; and it once formed part of this great connect- 

 ing land, now buried beneath the Atlantic, the English 

 Channel, and the German Ocean. The trees which 

 composed it still stand as upright stumps, firmly 

 bedded in a layer of tenacious clay ; and strewn 

 beneath them lie prostrate boles, in the very place 

 where the wind threw them down some fifty or sixty 

 thousand years ago. In the public garden at Hast- 

 ings, one of these huge balks, dug up on the St. 

 Leonard's beach, has been fixed as a curiosity ; and, 

 though its outer layer is charred and blackened by the 

 water, the inner wood is still as sound and as firm as 

 on the day it fell. We have to deal here with a time 

 which is marvellously ancient indeed when measured 



