230 Reviews — Guide to Antiquities of the Stone Age. 



Palaeolithic period to so great au extent upon geological data, that 

 one would naturally expect to have to pay a visit to the Cromwell 

 Eoad Branch of the British Museum at South Kensington in order 

 to understand the stratigraphical aspect of our Earth in relation 

 to early Man as one of its inhabitants. Mr. Eead, however, in 

 the first 14 pages of his Guide, gives us an excellent resume of 

 the Palaeolithic period, and takes us back first to the discovery by 

 Mr. Conyers (at the end of the seventeenth century) of a flint 

 implement, in gravel, near Gray's Inn Lane, London, together with an 



Fig. 2. — Shoe-shaped implement, Northfleet. (Fig. 8, p. 19 in Guide.) f uat. size. 

 elephant's tooth; and then on to Mr. John Frere's researches a century 

 later (1797), and the finding of flint implements in river gravel at 

 Hoxne, Suffolk, which the discoverer referred " to a very remote 

 period indeed, and to a people who had not the use of metals." 

 No other records occur of finds in valley gravels until M. Boucher 

 de Perthes' exploration of the deposits of the Somme Valley at 

 Abbeville (1850), where large quantities of implements evidently 

 fashioned by the hand of man were found. 



It is due, however, to the Eev. J. McEnery (a Eoman Catholic 

 priest living at Torquay, S. Devon) to mention that, so far back as 

 1825,^ he had discovered (not in river gravel, but) in Kent's Cavern^ 

 1 Published by E. Yi\ian, Esq., 1859. 



