504 Reviews—Foote’s Stone Implements in Madras, &c. 
cated, and illustrated by 29 plates in Mr. Foote’s Memoir, bear a 
most striking resemblance to the well-known archaic flint imple- 
ments of the valleys of the Somme, Seine, Thames, Ouze, Lark, &c., 
in France and England. ‘The long ‘cat-tongue,’ the subovate and 
leaf-like, the oval, and other shapes, being present among the large 
forms, as well as the broad-edged hatchet-like specimens, besides 
flakes, and an ‘arrow-lead.’ But these Indian implements have 
been formed out of the native quartzite, which breaks up with the 
same kind of fracture as flint, but with a somewhat different grain. 
Imbedded in the old undisturbed lateritic ferruginous alluvium 
(‘alluvial lateritic drift,’ not to be confounded with the much 
younger fluviatile alluvium), these stone implements tell of a past 
race of men frequenting what was then a shallow sea, in which the 
present hills were islands, and fashioning the siliceous rocks of the 
ecuntry into tools and arms by a precisely similar process, and in 
precisely similar shapes, to those adopted by the old flint-folk of 
Western Europe. As the valleys of France and England have been 
cut down some ninety feet since our archaic implements were mingled 
with the loam and gravel, so the lateritic gravels of Madras and 
Arcot have, in Mr. Foote’s opinion, risen up bodily, and been 
grooved and channeled by the existing water-courses since the 
quartz-workers left and lost their tools on the shores and shoals of 
the ‘ laterite-sea.’ 
As in Europe, so in India, some of the implements are as perfect 
as when freshly made, and some much worn by drifting. Many in- 
teresting points of detail and of hypothesis are treated of in Mr. 
Foote’s memoir, which is evidently the result of careful and con- 
scientious work worthy of, and likely to command, serious attention 
among those interested in geologic traces of mankind. 
Il. Tue Georocy or THE BerKs anp Hants EXTENSION AND 
MarrzoroucH Raitways. By J. Coprineton, F.G.S. (From the 
Magazine of the Wiltshire Archzol. and Nat. Hist. Soe., 1865, 
aie * 5 
PY RAILWAY-CUTTING, with the sides carefully sloped and 
well turfed over, is one of the most unpleasant of sights to the 
eye of the field-geologist, and the more so when he is unable to find 
any account of the section which that cutting once showed. Why 
do not our Field-clubs and Provincial Natural History Societies 
look after these things ? Would not the recording of such local 
facts be as fit work for their members as the propounding of theories, 
often crude and baseless’? It is too much to expect engineers to 
keep geological notes of their work ; and our thanks are due, there- 
fore, all the more to the engineer who has written the paper before 
us,—not the first of the sort from his pen. 
The cuttings of the Berks and Hants Extension Railway, which 
runs through the well-known Vale of Pewsey, are in valley-gravels, 
other surface-deposits, Chalk, and Upper Greensand. A good 
junction-section of the latter two was shown near Stert, of part of 
