244 Eminent Living Geologists— 
Asa cognate subject bearing on the Antiquity of Man, Mr. Prestwich 
drew up in conjunction with Mr. Busk, at the request of the Com- 
mittee of Investigation, the Report on Brixham Cave, published in 
the “ Philosophical Transactions” in 1872. Subsequently he brought 
out the first of his papers on the Pliocene and Pleistocene series, 
commencing with the Crags of Norfolk and Suffolk, between which 
and the Crags of Belgium he instituted a comparative examination 
of their organic remains; while in another paper, also read before 
the Geological Society, he has shown at how recent a date some of 
the important disturbances affecting Portland, and the valley denu- 
dation of the South of England have taken place. 
These were followed by a paper read before the Institute of 
Civil Engineers, “On the Geological Conditions affecting the Con- 
struction of a Tunnel between England and France,” in which he 
discussed the lithological characters, range and dimensions of the 
several formations on the two coasts, and showed that the Palaeozoic 
strata offered the safest passage, but that their depth was a very 
formidable bar. He afterwards brought before the same institution 
a paper “On the Origin of the Chesil Bank,” in which, differing 
from previous observers who attributed it to shingle, drifted from the 
Dorset and Devonshire Coasts, he showed that it was due to the 
wreck of the old “Raised Beach” of Pleistocene age, that he had 
hefore described and of which a remnant still exists, twenty-five 
feet above the sea-level, on the Bill of Portland, and which formerly 
stretched thence to the Devonshire and Cornish Coasts on one side 
and to Brighton on the other. 
In 1874, in another paper to the Royal Society, he brought 
together and reduced to a common standard all the observations on 
Deep-sea Temperatures made between the years 1749 and 1868, 
from which he deduces certain facts with respect to the flow of deep- 
seated currents, the position of the bathymetrical isotherms, and their 
bearing on some geological phenomena. 
When the Royal Coal Commission was appointed in 1866 Mr. 
Prestwich was one of its most prominent members, and in that 
capacity he drew up two of the sub-reports—the one ‘On the 
quantity of Unwrought Coal in the Coal-fields of Somerset, and the 
other, “On the Probability of finding Coal under the Newer Forma- 
tions of the South of England,” of which he took a favourable view. 
Jie was also one of the members of the ‘“ Royal Commission on 
Metropolitan Water Supply of 1869.” 
At a meeting of the British Association, at Swansea, in 1880, he 
brought before the Geological section some observations which 
tended to show that the South of England, and probably great part 
of Western Hurope, had been submerged at a very late geological 
time, and that thig,ewent marked the line between the great 
Mammalia of the Quaternary period with Paleolithic man, and man 
of the Neolithic or recent period. These views, however, met with 
considerable opposition. At the York meeting in 1881, he gave an 
outline of his researches on the strata immediately underlying the 
glacial series; and in another paper he contested the generally 
