Guise and Symonds on Belgian Bone-cams. 565 



and Wales, contain immense quantities of the bones of the extinct 

 animals, and here and there the implements of ancient men. 



We have for some time been of opinion that anany of the cavern 

 deposits vi'ould turn out to belong to the same epoch, geologically 

 speaking, as do the old valley gravels, and are, therefore, separated 

 from the history of our existing rivers and their alluvia, by the lapse 

 of untold ages. We visited the caves of Gower, which I had 

 already seen, in company with Sir Charles Lyell, and were convinced 

 that Lieut. -Col. Wood, the ardent explorer of the cave history of that 

 beautiful peninsula, had himself detected flint implements under 

 circumstances which proved the existence of man during the life- 

 time of the rhinoceros and other extinct mammalia. Again, the 

 caves of Tenby furnished us with corroborative proofs in the collec- 

 tion of the Eev. Mr. Smith, of Gumfroston, and the researches of the 

 Eev. H. H. Winwood. We also visited the celebrated Salisbury 

 sections, under the guidance of Dr. Blackmore and Mr. Brown, and 

 made ourselves acquainted vpith the physical geology of the sur- 

 rounding neighbom-hood. On this expedition we were accompanied 

 by our friend Mr. Eeginald Yorke, who had previously studied the 

 drift depositp of Amiens and Abbeville. We thoroughly examined 

 the high-level drifts, and the low-level drifts, and the remains of the 

 extinct animals collected by Dr. Blackmore ; we saw the places from 

 which many perfect implements were extracted by Mr. Brown and Dr. 

 Blackmore with their own hands ; and we all agreed with Mr. John 

 Evans, who first described these drifts, with regard to the inevitable 

 conclusions which must be drawn by any student of physical geology, 

 as to the antiquity of these remains of human industry and art. 



From Salisbury we also visited Hill Head, on the shores of 

 Southampton water, where other flint implements had been detected. 

 Here Mr. Yorke obtained a specimen which was no doubt imbedded 

 when the physical and climatal conditions were very different from 

 the present, and when what is now the summit of a sea cliff was 

 the bed of a great river, or an estuary, over which flowed waters 

 charged with ice rafts, which melted and deposited large, drifted, 

 angular blocks of Tertiary sandstone^ and quartzite in the gravel- 

 drift which contains the implements, and which, doubtless, belongs 

 to the same geological epoch as the old river shingles of Salisbury, 

 which were deposited under very different circumstances to those 

 under which the Salisbury streams now deposit their alluvia. When 

 every vale was filled, and every hill and eminence was covered with 

 snow and ice during the winter months, and when the waters rolled 

 rapidly under every summer's sun, carrying with them the eroded 

 quartzite masses, and the sharp, sub-angular flints. 



It was not then without much previous preparation and study among 

 the peculiar class of geological phenomena we wished to investigate, 

 that we determined to proceed to Belgium, to examine the geological 

 conditions under which the fossil remains of human beings had been 

 found by Dr. Edouard Dupont, of Dinant, ia caves in the Carboni- 



1 See Lieut. -Col. Nicoll's paper, Geol. Mag., Vol. III., p. 296, PI. XIII. 



