JOSEPH PRESTWICH. 663 



The discoveries, made known in 1847 by Boucher de Perthes, of flint 

 weapons together with teeth of the mammoth in the gravels of the 

 Somne Valley had attracted the attention of Dr. Falconer, and he 

 induced Prestwich, in 1859, to investigate these most interesting 

 deposits. After careful study, in which he was joined by Sir John 

 Evans, he satisfied himself that the flint implements were the work of 

 man, that they occurred undisturbed in beds of sand and gravel, 

 together with remains of mammoth, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, Hyccna 

 spelcea, and other Pleistocene mammalia. 



These researches were in part stimulated by the discovery, in 1858, of 

 flint implements with bones of extinct animals in Brixham Cave; and 

 they served to confirm the previous and long-neglected discovery of 

 flint implements in Kent's Hole, Torquay, made by the Bev. John 

 MacEnery. Sir John Evans, moreover, directed attention to the for- 

 gotten discovery of flint implements at Hoxne, in Suffolk, a fact 

 originally published in 1800. No time was, therefore, lost in visiting 

 this and other English localities, and the results were brought before 

 the Boyal Society in 1859 and 1862. At the conclusion of his second 

 paper, Prestwich remarks: "That we must greatly extend our present 

 chronology with respect to the first existence of man appears inevita- 

 ble; but that we should count by hundreds of thousands of years is, I 

 am convinced, in the present state of the inquiry, unsafe and prema- 

 ture." In his latest observations on the subject he has expressed his 

 belief " that Paheolithic man came down to within 10,000 to 12,000 

 years of our own time," while he may have had, " supposing him to be 

 of early Glacial age, no greater antiquity than, perhaps, about from 

 38,000 to 47,000 years." (Collected Papers, p. 46.) 



For his original researches on the valley deposits yielding implements 

 and weapons of Paleolithic man, Prestwich was awarded a royal 

 medal by the Royal Society in 1865. The full report on the exploration 

 of the Brixham Cave was prepared by Prestwich and communicated to 

 the same society in 1872, the animal remains being described by Busk, 

 and the flint implements by Sir John Evans. 



About the time of his retirement from business, in 1872, Mr. Prestwich 

 married the niece of his old friend Dr. Falconer, and settled in a house 

 (Darent Hulme) which he built at Shoreham, near Sevenoaks. He was 

 not, however, to retire from active geological work. After the death 

 of John Phillips, in 1874, he was offered the professorship of Geology at 

 Oxford, and this he accepted, now spending a portion of his time in 

 that city. The duties of a geological professor at Oxford are not, per- 

 haps, very onerous, but Prestwich filled the office with dignity and 

 advantage to the university. Phillips, who excelled in eloquence, had 

 at times no more than three students, as geology received no encour- 

 agement from the university authorities. Few geologists of note have, 

 therefore, hailed from Oxford as compared with Cambridge, and we call 

 to mind only Edgeworth David (now professor of geology in the Uni- 



