790 REPORTS ON THE STATE OF SCIENCE.—1913. 
by the characters of their edges and their lateral facets that they were 
battered by chance blows. 
It may be pointed out that the force of the waves is exerted in one 
general direction—i.e., from sea to shore—and consequently that a nodule 
embedded in a clay beach may be expected to bear signs of directed 
blows. An excellent illustration of this is afforded by a nodule which 
I observed firmly seated in the Bracklesham Clay of Selsey beach. Its 
pyramidal extremity projected vertically upwards into the air, the ‘ ven- 
tral ’ side was turned seawards, the two others towards the land, and 
the ventral edges exposed to blows from the sea were ‘ unilaterally ’ 
flaked, the long axes of the flakes running perpendicularly to the edge. 
So far as the evidence afforded by the Selsey flints is clear it is 
uniformly suggestive of the action of natural causes and affords little 
support for explanations based on the intervention of man; it is thus 
consistent with the evidence drawn from other sources,® such, for 
example, as the wide geological range of the ‘ rostro-carinate’ form 
(from Upper Miocene to Pleistocene or even recent) and its apparent 
purposelessness, for it belongs to the same class of so-called imple- 
ments as the eolithic scrapers which will not scrape, the borers which 
will not bore, and the planes which will not plane. ~ 
5 See also F. N. Haward, ‘The Chipping of Flints by Natural Agencies,’ 
Proc. Prehistoric Soc. of East Anglia, 1912, vol. 1, p. 185; W. H. Sutcliffe, “A 
Criticism of some Modern Tendencies in Prehistoric Anthropology,’ Mem. and 
Proc. Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc., 1913, vol. 57, No. 7. 
