1896.] the Plateau Gravel of Salisbury and elsewhere. 125 



of these are broken-up tuberous flints, some few are pieces of 

 tabular flint, that is, flint which has replaced the chalk along 

 lines of joint oblique to the bedding and across the bands of 

 tuberous flints. 



Of course the parts of each flint which are most likely to 

 get chipped are the more exposed points and thinner edges or 

 the curved margins which would hold a round stone when pressed 

 into the hollow. Thus we can easily make a selection of forms 

 which look as if they had got bruised at the point or edge by 

 being used. We can find many tabular flints which have got 

 chipped along an exposed corner or edge, many tuberous flints 

 which fit comfortably into the hand at one end, and have at the 

 other or on one side a point or edge which has got chipped. 



If over such a land surface we have here and there some 

 unfinished implements and misfits, both palaeolithic and neolithic 

 as well as recent strike-a-lights, and now and then all get washed 

 together, or creep down the hill into the same bed of gravel, it 

 might have been and it has been suggested, that a large number 

 of the natural pieces of flint owe their chips to their having been 

 picked up and used by primaeval man. The palaeotoliths, says 

 Mr Montgomerie Bell 1 , "are not shaped into particular forms by 

 the will and skill of the workman as palaeolithic flints are. They 

 are chipped flints rather than shaped flints, used tools, not made 

 tools." There is now in Jermyn Street a collection of flints, which 

 I made to illustrate the view that almost all the artificial forms of 

 implement, certainly all the common ones, were suggested by the 

 forms into which flint naturally breaks. If there be anything 

 in this, we might expect to find rude transitional forms among 

 surface-weathered flints. 



The points therefore which I would accentuate are that, unless 

 the mode of origin by rainwash and soil-creep above described be 

 borne in mind, these high-level gravels and flints may be referred 

 by some to a period the remoteness of which is measured by the 

 time it has taken to cut the valley down or the escarpment back 

 to the level of the existing rivers or the base of the present slopes ; 

 that all the specimens I exhibit are natural forms chipped by the 

 accidents common to all surface-soils ; that they are identical with 

 and represent every type of the palaeotoliths upon the character 

 and mode of occurrence of which the theory of the existence of 

 man in Britain before the palaeolithic age has been founded. 



We are all aware that the genuineness of the first found palaeo- 

 lithic implements was questioned by many who now believe in 

 them, especially when a priori reasons made them doubtful as 

 to the possibility of such a discovery. 



1 Brit. Assoc. Rep., Edinburgh, 1892, Trans. Sects., p. 900. 



