286 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
Quite right, M. Grras ; some do look as if they had just come from 
the hands of the workmen. Assuredly they do — and very naturally 
too, seeing tliey have in reality just come from the hands of the 
workmen. We have seen abundance of forgeries, both from the val- 
ley of the Somme and from Yorkshire. There are indeed plenty of 
forgeries. Nevertheless there are somermZ; these however are com- 
paratively few. Xo one ought to mistake the real geological flint- 
implements from the forgeries. No one who is used to break flints 
but ought to tell readily whether a flint was broken with an iron in- 
strument or not. A modern hammer will not crack or flake a flint 
in the same way that a stone wilL Try it, reader, and see for your- 
self. 
Setting aside forgeries, there is even then no reason why the flint- 
implements should not be in good preservation. If flrst frozen into a 
mass of ice, then transported enveloped in, and protected by that 
ice-casing, then dropped on the floor of the wide-spread river-flood 
by the melting of the ice, then covered over perchance by the soft 
materials of the summer stream, or left on the verdant marshy tract 
during the interval between the periodical floods, what was there to 
weather or otherwise injure so hard a substance as flint? Nothing 
that we know of. Moreover, the truth is, that as far as our experi- 
ence goes — and we have seen more than a few of the fossil flint-im- 
plements — they are by no means all always so wonderfully perfect. 
Some are decidedly worn — even as much so as the gravel in which 
they are found. 
2. The astonishing multitude of these axes. — Surely, no one thinks 
one man made the lot, or that they were all made at once. Geologists 
always cry out for "plenty of time." They ask for plenty of time — a 
whole geological age — for the formation of the gravel deposits. So 
therefore the primitive men had a ichole age to chip flints in. The 
very quantity of elephant and other bones found in the gravel-beds 
shows nature did take an age to form them, unless we suppose a super- 
natural increase and growth of living beasts, followed by an equally su- 
pernatural and wholesale destruction. But in reality, how common 
are the true worked flints ? AVe have seen ooie only from all the great 
gravel-beds round and under London, and miles of them have lately 
been cut through for the sewer-works. We have seen, may be, half a 
dozen from Suffolk, a like number from Bedford, two or three from 
Kent, and less than a dozen more from all parts of England. As to the 
Yorksliire specimens, we must know more about them, and where they 
