5G0 



IMBEDDING OF THE EEMAINS OF MAN AND [Ch. XLVIL 



extinct and living species. No pottery has been found strictly 

 referable to this era, and there is an entire absence of 

 metallic weapons. 



The beds of gravel often called drift, which contain anti- 



may 



same 



same 



had been scooped out to their present depth. The height 

 above the present alluvial plains at which the old drift occurs 

 is often no more than 20 or 30 feet, but sometimes 100 or even 

 200 feet. Flint flakes having a fine cutting edge, evidently 

 chipped off by the hand of man, are met with not only in the 

 old drift, but in formations of the Neolithic and Bronze ages, 

 for they afford the finest cutting edge that was obtainable 

 before the invention of steel. In the caves of this early Stone 

 period implements of the same antique type, with fossil skele- 

 tons of man, have been detected, agreeing, as before hinted, 

 (p. 487) in osteological character with some of the existing 

 races of man. It has been estimated that the number of 

 flint implements of the Palaeolithic type already found in 

 northern France and southern England, exclusive of flakes, is 



not less than 3,000.* No similar tools have been met with 

 in Denmark, Sweden, or Norway, where Nilsson, Thomsen, 

 and other antiquaries have collected with so much care the 

 relics of the Stone age. Hence it is supposed that Palseo- 

 litliic Man never penetrated into Scandinavia, which may 

 perhaps have been as much covered with ice and snow as the 

 greater part of Greenland is at present. 



Palceolithic implements in the drift of the south of Hampshire. 

 — Flint implements of the normal type of the Palaeolithic 

 period have been lately found in the south of Hampshire, 

 not in caves nor in old river-orravels within the limits of 



existing valleys, but in a tabular mass of drift which caps the 



Tertiary strata, and which is intersected both by the Solent 

 and by the valleys of all the rivers which flow into that channel 

 of the sea. The position of these implements, to which the 

 archaeologists of Salisbury have called our attention within the 



^' Sir J. Lubbock, Introduction to Nilsson's * Primitive Inhabitants of Scandi- 

 navia/ p. XX. 



1 



