M. GRAS' ATTACK ON THE FLINT-IiTPLEMENTS. 
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 staff 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 
again — if\k\Q 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 differ- 
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 Komaus 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 lieicing 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. 
