A BIG FOSSIL BONE, 71 



should be beforehand with me in securing 

 a splendid prize. He had found, he said, a 

 lot of * verterberries * — that is our loca ^ ^ord 

 for vertebrae — and also what he took to be a 

 flint implement. One can never trust the 

 scientific diagnosis of a quarryman, so I was 

 not quite sure whether he had really hit upon 

 a big saurian in the secondary lias, or upon 

 some mammalian remains in the quaternary 

 gravel which caps the cliff, and which the 

 workmen have to clear away in the course of 

 their excavations. Fortunately for me, it 

 turned out to be the latter : for I do not busy 

 myself much about * dragons,' as our navvies 

 call the great saw-toothed saurians, but I am 

 always interested in a stone instrument, or 

 anything else which bears directly upon the 

 early history of mankind. The bones proved 

 to be three fragments of a mammoth 

 skeleton ; and close beside them in the gravel 

 lay the sharp flint knife m sitiiy with which 

 perhaps some palaeolithic hunter had scraped 

 the bones of his huge prey a hundred thou- 



