34 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
the islets on Strangford Lough, and there also the flakes abound ; 
and they may be found for miles among debris at the foot of 
the white limestone hills. 
The chipped and barbed flint arrow-heads, so beautifully 
perfect in workmanship and symmetrical in form, are equally 
distributed throughout Ireland, but the ordinary flakes cleave 
so closely to their paternal home in the chalk, that the 700 
flakes in the museum of the Eoyal Irish Academy were nearly 
all obtained from the counties of Derry, Antrim, and Down.* 
The chalk of the south of England has neither been broken 
up by the intrusion of igneous rocks, nor suffered denudation 
equal to that of Ireland ; but on Salisbury Plain, at Andover, 
Whitchurch, Rochester, and Eastbourne, I have collected an 
abundance of flakes. And where the drift of Norfolk has 
ploughed up the surface of the chalk, I have found them in 
greater quantities, especially around Thetford, where they are 
thin and sharp. 
In no other part of Western Europe has the chalk suffered so 
much from denudation as in Denmark, it forms the basement 
beds of Jutland and the islands, and it has been rasped down 
by glacial action, and buried under thick beds of northern 
drift. If prehistoric man had lived as a savage hunter near 
this cold period, we might have expected to find his flake im- 
plements few and far between ; Schoolcraft estimates that it 
requires on an average seventy-eight square miles for the support 
of one hunter ; and the Indians of the Hudson’s Bay Company 
require ten square miles to each individual. But, on the con- 
trary, the flakes and chips are most abundant in Denmark. Sir 
John Lubbock says: “.To give an idea of the numbers in which 
they occur, I may mention that Professor Steenstrup and I 
gathered in about an hour at Froelund, near Korsor, 141 flakes, 
84 weight.s, 5 axes, 1 scraper, and about 150 flint chips.” . . . 
“ Some spots are often so thickly strewn with white flints that 
they may often be distinguished by their colour, when at a con- 
siderable distance.” f 
In Northern France there is a large development of chalk, 
forming the geological rim of tlie Paris basin ; I surveyed it 
from north to south during the past summer. From the water- 
shed which passes from near Boulogne to St. Pol and Bapaume, 
and thence further eastward, I found that angular flint gravel 
liad been wa.shed down the slopes on the northward over Bel- 
gium, and tlirough the valleys of the Somme and the Oise on 
the soutli. Much of the high land was coated with loess, but 
where the winter torrents had exposed a section the shattered 
• (’atuloji^uo of Antiquities in the Museum of the Uoyal Irish Academy. 
t “ rrehistoric Times,” p, 81. 
