The Inaugural Address, 



275 



material classical in his " Flint Chips/'and there is hardly an author, 

 who has written on pre-historic man, who has not added something 

 to our knowledge of what may be called the human relations of this 

 constant universal companion of man in his less civilised condition. 

 How recently, as compared with the span of man's existence, flint 

 has afforded him an implement for war — leaving the flint gun-lock 

 out of the question — is witnessed in the fact that the soil of Marathon, 

 that battlefield to which every civilised man looks back as if " he 

 too was a Greek/' is full of flint arrow-heads. 



The geologist, too, has of late stepped in to claim as common 

 ground with the archaeologist the record and history of whatever 

 relates to the more primeval forms of fashioned flint. 



For if the geologist is not one of those philosophers who consider 

 that " the proper study of Mankind is Man/'' he at least recognises 

 the importance of fossil man as the link that connects the long roll 

 of the world's phases that have succeeded each other and have passed, 

 with that living phase of the contemporary world in which man 

 stands supreme among the creatures of God. 



My purpose to-day is to trace the history of this mineral, flint, 

 so ubiquitous and so important from the point of view of human 

 development, not as the alien from its original birthplace in the 

 chalk, but as we find it there, and as it may have been before it and 

 the chalk that contains it were lifted from the depths of the cre- 

 taceous ocean. And my endeavour will be to put before you in a 

 logical and I hope intelligible form the evidence that the flints 

 themselves afford as to their origin beneath that ocean. That history 

 is not complete, but I think at least we can fill in its general 

 outlines. If the archaeologist and the historian, for whom he finds 

 the materials, reason from the written records of the past, as in- 

 terpreted by still extant relics of the outer world to which those 

 records refer, no less must the geologist, who is a historian in the 

 large sense of the word, draw his records from the evidence written 

 in the flint itself, and from the conditions in which the flint is found 

 in its first home, the chalk. 



For stones are never mute if you know their language. What 

 then do these flints say ? Let us first study their language and 



