40 THE PROBLEM OF ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN AUSTRALIA 
similar implements are commonly found on the surface in Victoria. 
He gave the specimen to the National Museum and supplied the 
following information. The excavation, which is 10 ft. deep, passed 
through soil 3 ft., bedded voleanic tuff 2 ft., black clay 3 ft., and 
yellow clay 2 ft. The yellow clay and the base of the black clay 
contained numerous fragments of marsupial bones. ‘The millstone 
was embedded in the yellow clay 2 ft. below the level of the bed 
of the drainage channel and 3 ft. distant from it. Merry, while 
digging in the yellow clay, felt his shovel strike against a solid 
object and, thinking it might be a large fragment of bone, he dug 
it out carefully. Shortly afterwards he showed it to Dr. Beaton, 
a local medical practitioner, and after the adhering yellow clay 
had been washed off, both of them recognized it as a stone imple- 
ment. Merry found another stone implement in clay thrown out 
of the excavation, but could not be certain which part of the hole 
it came from. He added that R. Harvie, who had been employed 
in excavating the drainage channel in 1893, told him that he had 
dug up a grindstone from similar yellow clay 4 ft. below the bedded 
tuff layer at a site about one chain west of the culvert, and that 
a petrified human skull had also been found 5 ft. below the tuff 
about 100 yards west of the culvert, but the skull was broken up 
and thrown away by the workman who found it. Sir Baldwin 
Spencer and R. H. Walcott, in December, 1908, made excavations 
alongside the drainage channel near the culvert but found nothing 
except fragments of marsupial bones. Spencer and Walcott (1911) 
recorded the implement without giving full details since their 
paper concerned scars and scratches on fossil marsupial bones 
from this and other localities. Further excavations should be made 
at this site. 
Stone implements are said to have been found under tuff near 
Mount Schank, South Australia, but no particulars are available. 
In 1854 a basalt axe-head was found by A. C. Swinton at a depth 
of 4 ft. in alluvial wash in which he was sinking a shaft that 
bottomed on bedrock at 5 ft. (Howitt, 1898); the wash was 
cemented gravel with three false bottoms and was situated in a 
small tributary valley of the main lead near Maryborough, Vic- 
toria. About 40 years later, Swinton, at the request of Howitt, 
marked on a plan the position of this shaft, and Stanley Hunter, 
an officer of the Geological Survey, examined the locality. Hunter 
found that the tributary referred to by Swinton is one of the heads 
of the Bet Bet sub-basaltic lead (buried river valley) and he 
considered that the lower deposits of wash in the tributary may 
be of the same age as the sub-basaltie wash of the Bet Bet lead. 
At a later date Hunter told Gregory that he did not attach much 
