2 Eminent Living Geologids — 



be imagined that in such a business mathematical, mechanical, 

 chemical, and geological knowledge might all be most valuable aids, 

 and so it proved, for in 1851, when but 28 years of age, John 

 Evans became a partner in the firm. About this time a celebrated 

 lawsuit, Dickinson v. The Grand Junction Canal Co., turning on the 

 question of water-supply, led him to pay still more special attention to 

 geology than heretofore, and in this inquiry he had the good fortune 

 to establish a warm personal friendship with Mr. (afterwards Sir) 

 Joseph Prestwich, which lasted to the end of the latter's life. 



Besides the question of water-supply and the Tertiary and Chalk 

 formations, in which Prestwich was from an early period the great 

 authority, and to which from that time forward John Evans also 

 devoted most earnest attention, they had a common interest in 

 collecting and studying flint implements from the gravels and other 

 superficial deposits, in which, following the late Joshua Trimmer, 

 Prestwich undertook the task of classifying and synchronising the 

 strata, named by him ' Quaternary,' as Evans did with regard to the 

 flint implements containt-d in them, and Falconer in respect to their 

 associated mammalian remains. 



In 1852 John Evans became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, 

 of which Society 33 years later he was elected President, holding the 

 chair for seven years { 1 885-92). 



In 1841 M. JBoucher de Perthes began to collect, and in 1847 to 

 publish his researches in the gravel deposits of the Valley of the 

 Somme ai'ound Abbeville, and the sight of his collection incited 

 Dr. EigoUot to search the gravel-pits around Amiens, which also 

 yielded abundant evidence, in palaeolithic flint implements, of the 

 former presence of prehistoric man. It was the part taken in 1858-9 

 by Falconer, Prestwich, Evans, Lubbock, and others which at length 

 secured for Boucher de Perthes the recognition that he deserved for 

 his labour in the field of prehistoric archaeology, which heretofore had 

 been denied him by his countrymen in France. Then old records 

 were unearthed, and it was ascertained by John Evans that about the 

 year 1700 bones of the Mammoth {E. primigeniuH) had been found 

 together with a flint weapon made by primitive man in Gray's Inn 

 Lane London.^ He also recalled and republished Mr. Frere's account 

 of the finding of flint implements with remains of Klephant, Rhinoceros, 

 and Hippopotamus, in the Valley of the Waveney, at Hoxne, 1797." 

 So long ago as 1824 the Rev. Dr. John Fleming in an article in the 

 Edinburgh Philosophical Journal (vol. xi) advocated the contem- 

 poraneity of the human and animal remains found in cave-deposits ; 

 and the exploration of Kent's Cavern before Pengelly's days by the 

 Rev. J. McEnery, in 1824, led to the discoveiy of flint implements of 

 undoubted human workmanship, with bones and teeth of the Mammoth, 

 the Machaerodus, Rhinoceros, Cave Bear, and other mammals, but 

 McEnery distrusted his own discoveries at that time as being doubtfully 

 contemporaneous.^ 



> Evans, " Stone Implements," 1872, pp. 521-2. 



' See "Flint Implements from the Drift," 1859; also Geologist, 1861, vol. iv, 

 pp. 20-1. 



3 Geol. Mag., 1902, pp. 116-117. 



