III. — Flint Finds. — By the Rev. H. Longueville Jones, M.A. 



CONSIDERABLE controversy is going on in the geological and 

 archaeological sections of the scientific world, on the date and 

 nature of FHnt Finds. As was the case some 50 or 60 years ago, 

 men of eminence in each of these sections have been hasty to 

 theorize, instead of patient to examine; and the rashness of 

 cosmological speculations on the subject has been equalled only 

 by the creduhty of archaeological ones. By the geologists, all 

 archaeological data have been rudely treated, or set aside as con- 

 tradictory to fact ; and by archaeologists the most palpable fabri- 

 cations of fanciful discoveries have been accepted, in compliance 

 with the supposed exigencies of physical science. Thus geologists 

 have seen archaeological objects, and specimens of human fabrica- 

 tion, in formations which, they gravely assure us, must have taken 

 many myriads of years — perhaps of centuries — to produce. Archae- 

 ologists, accepting their dicta upon the date and nature of the 

 supposed objects of human workmanship, have immediately as- 

 signed positive characters to objects found in tumuli, caves, &c., 

 and have carried back the formation of such receptacles to periods 

 corresponding to predetermined geological epochs. Thus, in the 

 gravels of the district of the Somme, and other parts of France, 

 and in similar formations in England, because geologists have pro- 

 nounced such gravels, &c., to require immense periods of time for 

 their formation, and becaus^ certain portions of flint have been 

 found to lie in these gravels in very great numbers, and such 

 flints have been conjectured to shew signs of the hand of man 

 having been employed upon them, therefore archaeologists have 

 been hasty to admit that the so-called manufactured flints and the 

 gravels have been contemporaneous. They have allowed the geo- 

 logists to assign dates to the gravel, and they have accepted these 

 dates as at least posterior to the manufacturing of the flints. From 

 this they have also been hasty to accept these dates as applying to 

 manufactured flmts found under less ambiguous circumstances; 

 and then they have at once carried back the dates of the monu- 

 ments in which the flints have been found — not indeed to the 

 same periods as the gravels — but to far remoter periods than they 



