MAN IN ZOOLOGY. 17 



improbable. When he told us, further, that the worked edges 

 are commonly rounded off and blunted, and the worked surfaces 

 stained of a deep brown colour, like the natural flint, so that the 

 artificial work is often rendered obscure, he made an admission 

 which is significant of a very great antiquity in the objects, 

 if they be in fact implements worked by Man's hand. 



Sir Joseph Prestwich himself, indeed, seemed to shrink from 

 all the conclusions to which his researches into the antiquity of 

 these objects appeared to lead him. If it should prove, he said, 

 that the rude implements have been swept down from Central 

 Wealden uplands forming in pre-glacial tirros a low mountain 

 range 2000 to 3000 feet in height with the drift which has come 

 from that quarter, they may have to be relegated to a very early 

 period indeed ; but that must be a question for the future. We 

 cannot refuse to exercise the same degree of caution, though we 

 run no risk in asserting that it must be exceedingly probable 

 that the industry of fabricating flint implements was a pro- 

 gressive industry, commencing with rudimentary forms, and 

 proceeding by degrees to more elaborate and finished work. 



Elsewhere the same enquiry has been pursued, and Mr. 

 Shrubsole has discovered flint implements of the like primitive 

 type at Finchampstead and Old Dean, in Berkshire. Mr. Allen 

 Brown has recognized that these roughly worked flints carry 

 Man back to an earlier period than that called palaeolithic, and 

 suggests for it the name " eolithic." Mr. A. M. Bell has also 

 studied the question, and arrived at the conclusion that Sir J. 

 Prestwich was right in his views. 



However this may be, there can be no doubt whatever as to 



the flint implements called palaeolithic. One, now in the British 



Museum, was found in Gray's Inn Road as far back as 1690. 



{ Mr. John Frere, who in the year 1797 read a paper before the 



p* Society of Antiquaries, on some flint weapons discovered at 



to Hoxne, in Suffolk, remarked that they were evidently weapons 



of war, fabricated and used by a people who had not the use 



^ of metals, and must be considered objects of curiosity from 



the situation in which they were found, which might tempt us to 



refer them to a very remote period indeed. A few other similar 



discoveries were made afterwards, but Mr. Frere's far-seeing 



suggestion remained unnoticed for sixty years, until M. Boucher 



Zool. 4th ser. vol. I., Jan. 1897. c 



