580 Notices respecting New Boohs. 



and its woodcut. On the title-page a man and his two wives, 

 with an infant-girl, make a fallen tree their resting-place by 

 the water-side. They are destitute of even skins for raiment, 

 and have no apparent belongings except a club near one woman, 

 and a stone-weapon strapped to the waist of the other. Their 

 luxuriant hair, carefully parted or otherwise arranged, barely 

 hides their sharp-pointed ears ; tatoo-marks seem to add width 

 to the female mouths, whilst the man has a moustache. They 

 are all looking earnestly in one direction (towards us, as if to be 

 photographed), waiting for something or somebody. 



The chief interest of the book is connected with the district 

 round about Caddington, a village 30 miles north of London, 

 3 miles south-east of Dunstable, and 2 miles south-west of Luton. 

 Here Mr. W. Gr. Smith has discovered very many man-made 

 weapons and tools of flint, of very great antiquity, on the highest 

 hill-tops of the Chalk, which are capped with stony clays, gravels, 

 and brickearths. These deposits are described briefly at page 70, 

 and in more detail, with carefully drawn sections, in subsequent 

 pages. Flint implements occur in the upper clays and gravels, 

 which are much distorted, and here and there pushed down, as it 

 were, in violent curvatures, into the underlying brickearth. The 

 last-mentioned deposit is about 50 feet thick in some places ; and 

 Mr. Smith found in it, at some 10 or 12 feet from the surface of 

 the ground, one or more levels distinguished by small heaps of 

 flints, artificially accumulated in some olden time ; and he observed 

 that, both among them and on the intervening spaces, many of the 

 flints had been broken and "dressed/'" or shaped for use. He 

 succeeded in fitting together hundreds of the flakes and pieces that 

 had been disregarded and thrown aside by the primeval artificers 

 of stone tools and weapons. 



Carefully following out the indications of this tool-making area, 

 Mr. Smith traces it, by sections, through Caddington Hill (page 64), 

 as having been a part of an old land-surface, bearing one or more 

 lakes or pools along a marshy valley ; and on the valley-sides, near 

 the water, the flint-folk must have lived and worked, leaving their 

 refuse to mark what is termed a " palaeolithic floor," because the 

 tools have certain shapes, regarded as characteristic of the older- 

 stone-age implements, or " paheoliths." 



In the " upper red clay drift " of the brick-pits, smaller, more 

 roughly shaped, ochreous or chocolate-coloured implements are 

 met with ; and these, evidently deposited long after the working- 

 floor, or lake-side living-place, was covered up, were probably 

 derived by the natural agency of water descending from neigh- 

 bouring hills, and bringing with it the washings of some local 

 ochreous capping, possibly very much older than any of the valley- 

 deposits. 



After describing these more or less stratified materials, and 

 endeavouring to explain the conditions under which they were 

 formed and modified, — and giving particulars of bis long examina- 

 tion of the sections, and his persistent search for the actual pits 



