President's Address. 
V 
characterised also by the presence of the Hipparion, the ancestor of 
the horse, &c. 
In 1899 Mr. B. Harrison brought to the notice of antiquarians the 
famous " plateau implements " found in gravels capping the high plateau 
of Kent. That this plateau is veiy ancient is admitted by all ; it is lying 
at a higher level than any of the existing terraces. By some the deposits 
are looked upon as pre-glacial, by others as belonging to the Phocene. 
The term " eolith " was invented for these very amorphous flints, and the 
controversy about their having been artificially dressed, or having come 
to their present form by natural agencies has not yet ceased, although its 
heat greatly cooled down when M. M. Boule, who it must be said, in 
fairness, always opposed the theory of the eoliths of Aurillac and 
Thenay, showed pretty conclusively that mechanical agents do easily 
and naturally transform flint nodules into " eoliths." His demonstra- 
tion appeared in " L'Anthropologie," 1905, and can be summed up 
as follows : — 
At Guervilles, near Mantes (France), is a factory where cement is 
prepared by means of rotary machines moving in a tub filled with chalk 
and plastic clay. When the process is over the fragments of flint left 
in the residue exhibit all the shapes and forms claimed to be artefacts by 
the partisans of the eolithic doctrine. Not only are the "crescent-shaped," 
"hollow-end," "horse-shoe" scrapers of the Kent eoliths, or of the 
Oligocene of certain parts of Belgium reproduced, but also — and this is 
perhaps more important— rough scrapers of the Magdalenian type, and 
some with a Neolithic facies. The speed of the water at the periphery 
of the vats was found to be only four metres a second, a speed that cannot 
compare with that of the large European rivers in flood. It is a matter 
of knowledge, or at least accepted as such, that the torrential floods of 
to-day cannot also compare with the torrential forces of the Quaternary 
(Pleistocene) rivers. 
I have given elsewhere my reasons for not accepting the alleged eolithic 
theory with regard to some water-worn quartzitic examples from Pretoria, 
but I may here give my experience of the implements of a siliceous 
texture (chalcedony) occurring at or near the Victoria Falls, where this 
material prevailed : at least I found no other. 
Among many crescent-shaped, undoubted tools, worn by the attrition 
of sand, which has now disappeared, to the great surprise of my com- 
panion, Mr. Maufe, of the Ehodesian Geological Survey, in whose 
company I was, we found several nuclei of large size, and also circular, 
disc-like pieces, of not much thickness and certainly not exhibiting the 
famous "bulb of concussion" in which I still believe. My companion 
exclaimed, " These are split by the sun-heat." I had come to this conclu- 
sion an hour before, as I was groping my way among the two surface 
