342 PREHISTORIC EUROPE. 



course, indicates a former greater amount of elevation. Similar 

 buried river-channels occur in the east of England, and doubt- 

 less many exist that we do not know of. Could all the deposits 

 of Pleistocene age be taken out of the valley of the Thames so 

 as to lay bare the older Tertiary and Cretaceous strata, we should 

 find that the sea would enter far into the country and cover a 

 broad area. No one, indeed, can study the distribution of the 

 old Pleistocene "river-drifts" without perceiving that the valleys 

 in which they lie must at one time have extended much farther 

 into regions that are now submerged. There is nothing, there- 

 fore, abnormal in the fact that the hollow occupied by the Solent 

 was, in Palaeolithic times, a land -valley. By referring to the 

 Admiralty's charts we find that the average depth of the Solent 

 is not more than 54 feet, but there are some places where it is 

 as much as 70 and 120 feet. In Southampton Water depths of 

 70 and 90 feet occur. If the greatest depths of the Solent be 

 not due to the action of currents eroding the sea-bottom (which 

 is unlikely), then it would follow that the ancient submerged 

 valley might well have continued eastward to a point not far 

 removed from the present 30-fathom line. Of course in all this 

 there is an element of uncertainty, and I only state it to show 

 that there is nothing unreasonable or extravagant in the view 

 that the old river of the Solent may have been a tributary of the 

 Seine in Palaeolithic times. But that Palaeolithic man saw the 

 Isle of Wight as part of the mainland there cannot be any 

 reasonable doubt. He and his congeners may have wandered 

 upon the slopes of the high chalk downs that once extended 

 between the Needles and the Dorset coast, but have long since 

 crumbled into the sea ; and they may have followed the ancient 

 river of the Solent down through what is now Southampton 

 Water to the shores of the sea somewhere opposite Selsea. But 

 if, as we have many reasons for believing was the case, our 

 land stood in those days several hundred feet higher, then man 

 may have hunted the mammoth and the reindeer over the whole 

 wide area now covered by the waters of the English Channel. 1 



l For their knowledge of the geographical conditions which obtained in 



