342 Sir E. H. Howorth~The Earliest Traces of Man. 



simply phases of one continuous period. It would not, therefore, be 

 prima facie improbable if the remains of Paleolithic man should be 

 found in the Forest Bed. 



Such remains are claimed to have been found at that horizon 

 in Norfolk by Mr. Abbott and Mr. Savin, in Dorsetshire by 

 Dr. Blackmore, and they have been also reported from the same 

 horizon at St. Prest in France and in the Val d'Arno, north of 

 Italy, in each case the remains of human workmanship being 

 accompanied by those of E. meridionalis. I believe these finds 

 are quite genuine. They are what we should prima facie have 

 expected, and so far as we know they are the earliest remains of 

 man hitherto found. 



So far there is a fairly general agreement among geologists and 

 archseologists in regard to the evidence about primitive man. At 

 this point, however, a clear divergence must be recognized. A small 

 and pertinacious body of inquirers, including especially Mr. B. 

 Harrison, Mr. W. J. Lewis, and the Rev. E. A. Bullen, have in 

 season and out of season insisted that traces of human workmanship 

 have been discovered at a much earlier horizon in the form of very 

 rude flint implements which have been found in the so-called 

 plateau gravels of Southern England. To these implements the 

 name of eoliths has been given, and the champions of their age and 

 authenticity number among them no less important persons than 

 Professor Prestwich and Professor Eupert Jones. They have 

 failed, however, to secure the countenance of a large number of 

 sceptical critics, among whom I confess I find myself. I have seen 

 many hundreds of these eoliths, but I have seen very few which 

 seem to me to have any purpose or motive of any kind in their 

 shape or construction. This was fully admitted by Prestwich, who 

 confessed that the number of these stones which showed any rational 

 purpose in their shape was a very small percentage indeed, and 

 surely this ought to be the first and prime necessity in attributing 

 them to human handiwork. It was this special feature in the 

 palaeoliths of the river gravels and the caves which made men first 

 assign them to human handiwork. How can this same conclusion 

 be applied to thousands of shapeless stones, whose irregular outlines 

 defy all classification ? The champions of the stones fall back upon 

 a class of tools whose shape need not be very precise, and to read 

 their lucubrations one would suppose that the men and women who 

 used these eoliths were engaged from January to December in 

 nothing else but scraping skins. Some have, in fact, suggested that 

 they did nothing else than scrape their own skins, and that the 

 eoliths performed the double function of strygils and vermin-killers ! 

 There are no arrow-heads amongst these stones, no lances, no 

 tools such as we are accustomed to find among recognized palseoliths. 



What we do find, and what needs explanation, is a large number 

 of once angular flints whose angles have been rubbed down by 

 trituration, probably in a stream, and whose edges have been snipped 

 all round their sinuous outlines. This snipping seems to be the only 

 reasonable ground for attributing them to human hands. I am 



