t 



Man and the Mammoth. 539 



the hand of man ; and I say this with authority, since, 

 for more than thirty years, I have been daily in the 

 habit of handling stones, and no man who knows how v 

 chalk flints are fractured by nature, would doubt the 

 artificial character of these ancient tools or weapons. 



The same kind of observations have been made 

 in our own country. In the neighbourhood of Bedford, 

 on the Ouse, there are beds of river gravel of this 

 kind which rise about twenty-five feet above the level 

 of the uiver, in broad terraces ; and in one of these, 

 far above the river, there have been found a consider- 

 able number of flint hatchets, associated with river 

 shells, the bones of the Mammoth, old varieties of 

 oxen, and various other mammalia. By the river 

 Waveney also, on the borders of Norfolk and Suffolk, 

 at Hoxne near Diss, the same phenomena have been 

 observed in old gravel pits, made for the extraction of 

 road materials ; and it has been proved that near the 

 mouth of the estuary of the Thames, between the 

 Keculvers and Herne Bay, flint hatchets of Palaeolithic 

 type have fallen from the top of a cliff of Eocene sand, 

 which is capped with high-level river-gravel of the 

 ancient river. These were first found by Mr. T. Leech 

 (see fig. 112). Later I found one on the beach partly 

 water-worn by the waves, and at the same time, Prof. 

 T. McKenny Hughes found another, fresh and unworn, 

 and both are of palaeolithic type. No bones have as yet 

 been observed in that precise locality along with the 

 implements, but in many places further up the Thames, 

 the remains have been found of extinct mammalia. For 

 example, at Acton, a few miles west of London, at a 

 height of about twenty feet above high-river mark, 

 Colonel Lane Fox found Elephas primigenius, Rhi- 

 noceros hemitcechus, Hippopotamus major, Bosprimi- 



