M. GRAS' ATTACK OX THE FLINT-IMPLEMENTS. 



293 



strikes us forcibly that, with one of those poor pointed tools, a man 

 would soon be tired of the attempt to dig a hole in gravel, much less 

 a gallery. Half a dozen strong men — and this supposes the ancient 

 manufacturer to have kept a stalf of workmen, unless he got volun- 

 tary help from his tribe — would make but sorry progress with those 

 pointed flints. Even our stalwart navvies would strike from such 

 work with such tools. But if — we must use the little conjunction 

 agaia — if t\\e pits and tunnels were dug, were actually made, it is not 

 true to suppose we should have no evidence of their former existence. 

 The gravel would not sink into the excavations and show no difi'er- 

 ence of structure at those spots which had been hollowed out of the 

 beds ; for even such unsorted and heterogeneous deposits as gravel- 

 beds are, they do distinctly show traces of former disturbances. "We 

 have clearly traced, by their appearances, disturbances made in 

 gravel-beds by the liomans and Saxons in forming their graves or in 

 digging for foundations of walls or pits ; and what is likely to be dis- 

 tinctly apparent after the lapse of a thousand or more years, may be 

 presumed to be at least detectable after the lapse of far longer ages. 

 Moreover, if this explanation of M. Gras be acceded to, it involves 

 the corresponding necessity of our finding the flint-implements in 

 heaps or in narrow lines, — where the pits and galleries have been, — 

 and not disseminated here and there, as they are, at least most 

 usually, if not invariably. Supposing, as M. Gras does, that the 

 subsidence into the galleries extended to the roof, there would be a 

 furrow left at the surface, in which more recent deposits would accu- 

 mulate, and if there were any sub-superficial coating of brick-earth 

 under the soil, that would bulge 

 downwards in concentric, curved 

 laminae, such as we constantly see 

 exposed in stone-quarries when 

 surface-clays have sunk down into 

 fissures, and as we constantly ob- 

 serve in the sand and gravel pipes 

 of the Chalk districts, in which too 

 we often find patches of older Ter- 

 tiary clays, containing shells that 

 have been embedded in the overlying quaternary drifts. 



The accompanying little cut of an exposure of one of these subsi- 

 dences in Mr. Bensted's quarry, at Maidstone, will show at once how 

 visibly they leave their traces. 



7. The rudeness of the implements suggestive of rough hewing for 



Section in Ragstone beds at Maidstone : 

 1. Brick earth; 2. Yellowsand ; 3. 

 Fullers' earth, rolled; 4. Sand and 

 gravel, filling up a fissure in 5. Kent- 

 ish rag strata. 



