38 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



the first inspection that took place by means of this machine, a shovel and 

 hammer were left on the spot by the divers ; but these tools were, contrary to 

 their expectations, nowhere to be found on their next visit. In the progress 

 of the excavation, however, while advancing the protecting wooden framework, 

 this missing shovel and hammer were found in the way of it, having descended 

 at least eighteen feet into the ground, and probably resting on, or mixed up 

 with some ancient deposit. Supposing these articles had not been recovered 

 by the excavators ; and that the soft stratum through which they sunk so deeply 

 had, by some geological changes in the locality, become solidified, and encrusted 

 with several layers of fresh soil, and that some future geologist had found the 

 lost hammer and shovel in the .position described, it would, doubtless, have 

 furnished as strong an argument in that day for the vast antiquity of the human 

 race, as the discovery of these said flint implements in the drift has done in our 

 own. 



I am not aware of what material the superincumbent stratum above the drift 

 in that place is composed ; but, however compact now, it may possibly in a 

 former age have been sufficiently liquified by some aqueous irruption or sub- 

 mersion to cause substances of the specific gravity of flint to sink through it ; 

 as the silex has evidently done through the chalk in a fluid state, or as our 

 shovel and hammer did through the soil in .he river. 



Whatever difficulties may attend this hypothesis, they certainly are not greater 

 than are involved in the startling, and wholly unsupported assumption that the 

 late flint discovery proves man to have existed before the straits of Dover were 

 formed, or the mammoth and other fossil animals had become extinct. 



After all, it may perhaps be a question whether surmises and speculations of 

 this kind are at all needful in the present case — whether geologists themselves 

 have not occasioned all the doubt and mystery respecting these flint-instruments, 

 by assigning an antiquity to the Drift formation which does not belong to it ; 

 assuming a fact which is only theory based on some erroneous data. Indeed, 

 between the advocates for the remote and those for the recent creation of man, 

 it is solely a question as to the authenticity of the respectively ascribed dates, or 

 which of these widely varying periods has the greatest weight of probability or 

 evidence to support it ; and here, apart from the Mosaic account of this event, 

 all the past history and present state of man upon earth tends to prove (in 

 geological language) his modern introduction on our globe — that he was the last, 

 as well as the most perfect of all the great and marvellous works of God. 



If, therefore, there are valid reasons for concluding that man has not been in 

 existence more than somewhere about six thousand years, the theory that would 

 give him a date of forty or fifty thousand, especially if founded only on the 

 discovery of wrought flints in so equivocal a formation as the Drift, cannot be 

 considered to be of sufficient authority to shake the generally entertained belief 

 on the subject. — Quaere. 



Roman Antiquities under Bog Earth at Canterbury. — Dear Sir, — • 

 A large pipe drain is being laid down in Canterbury, the course of it running 

 the whole length of the city from the houses in Barton Eields, beyond the Lon- 

 don and Chat ham Railway on the Dover Road, to the River Stour at East 

 Bridge. 



The cutting is from ten to fifteen feet deep. In one part of the line the 

 w ork men came to a stratum of bog earth, lying at about nine feet below the 

 pavement. On each side of the black earth, and at the same depth, remains of 

 Roman pottery, and, apparently, Roman foundations of buildings were found. 

 These men also dug up some ornaments for the person, and other similar things. 

 Some of this earth I have subjected to the process of boiling in acid, and upon 

 examining with the microscope the residue, I found various Biatomacece, Cosci- 

 nodisci Navicular, &c. 



