398 Sir H. H. Hoicorth — The Mammoth and the Glacial Drift. 



Feet. 



1 to 2 «. Surface soil, traces of sand and gravel. 

 10 to 12 b. Brown and greyish clay, not calcareous, used for brick-earth, with an 

 irregular central carbonaceous or peaty seam. Two flint implements 

 found in this seam the previous winter. 

 ■| to 1 c. Yellow rectangular flint gravel with some chalk pebbles and pebbles of 

 siliceous sandstone quartz, and other older rocks. Bones of Mammalia. 

 3 to 4 <;?. Bluish and grey calcareous clay in places very peaty, with wood and 

 vegetable remains, land and fresh-water shells. Bones of Mammalia. 

 1 to \\e. Gravel like e, but smaller and more worn, with more chalk pebbles. 



/. Calcareous grey clay more or less peaty, with fresh-water shells. Mr, 

 Prestwich says he made a boring in this clay 17 feet deep without 

 reaching bottom. 



It is true that Mr. Prestwicli and Sir J. Evans had some trenches 

 dug in other parts of the field which showed the white and ochreous 

 sands and gravels to be underlaid by a grey clay, but I altogether 

 demur to treating this clay as boulder-clay. It seems to me to 

 answer to the clay marked / in the big section in the pit. At a 

 distance of 150 yards from this pit is another pit where Boulder- 

 clay is dug, and here we are expressly told that no other beds were 

 exposed {id. p. 307), Mr. Prestwich himself calls attention to the 

 unsatisfactory character of the evidence [id,). The Boulder-clay caps 

 all the hills around. Its very uneven base rests on white and yellow 

 sands and gravel. 



In 1876 Mr. Belt wrote an elaborate paper in the Quarterly 

 Journal of Science, giving many sections of the ground at Hoxne, 

 in which he shai'ply contested Professor Prestwich's conclusions, 

 and avowed his opinion that the facts prove the implement-bearing 

 gravel there to underlie and not overlie the Boulder-clay. 



Lastly, let me quote my friend Mr. H. B. Woodward. In a paper 

 read before the Norwich Geol Soc. he says : Mr. Belt recorded traces 

 of Chalky Boulder-clay on the Hoxne beds, and my colleague Mr. 

 Reid and myself subsequently observed tioo tiny traces of this Boidder- 

 clay on the bricJc-earth in the pit in the park (Proc. Norwich Geol. 

 Soc. pt. ii. p. 62). It having been suggested that these pockets of 

 Boulder-clay were brought into their position by man, Mr. Eeid 

 vrrites " they seemed to have been there for a long while, for they 

 were grassed over, and, if I remember rightly, an oak tree was 

 growing on one of them (Mems. Geol. Surv. 50 N.S. p. 30). 



It is clear therefore that when analj'zed, the case so often quoted, 

 and upon which such a stupendous induction has been based, utterly 

 breaks down, and that the evidence there, if it points a moral 

 at all, points to the actual reverse of the one maintained by so many 

 geologists. 



Let us, however, proceed further, and in the first place turn to 

 another district in Suffolk, namely, the neighbourhood of Brandon. 



Mr. Skertchly afiirms positively, in one of the volumes of the 

 Mems. of the Geol. Survey, that Early Palaeolithic remains are 

 found there in a series of loams, sands, and gravels overlaid by 

 chalky Boulder-clay. "To this series," he says, "I have given the 

 name of the Brandon beds. They are very fragmentary, but seem 

 to occur pretty nearly all over East Anglia wherever the chalky 



