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. Supposmg these articles had not been recovered 
by the excavators ; and that the soft stratum through which they sunk so deeply 
had, bv some geological changes in the locality, become solidified, and encrusted 
with several layers of fresh soil, and that some futui-e 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 aU 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 grest and man^ellous 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.— Qu.EEE. 
Ro:\iAy A^sTiQriTiLs undeu Bog Earth at Ca^jterbuey. — 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 Fields, beyond the Lon- 
don and Chatham 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 
workmen caine 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 Diatomaceo', Cosci- 
nodisci Naviculfr, &c. 
