56 
and not distinguishable in make and form from the flint 
flakes found in the river gravels of England and France. 
They occur in great numbers and are usually of a whitish 
colour, with a porcellaneous glaze upon them, a good evi- 
dence of their antiquity which no fresh fractured flint can 
simulate. This appearance is no doubt due to long expo- 
sure and decomposition of the outer crust of the flint. 
The reason for their great abundance in these localities 
may be due to the unlimited supply of the raw material 
which is furnished by the flint gravels which line the coast 
What are known as scrapers or thumb flints are also 
found as well as the flinty cores from which the flakes have 
been struck. 
If these flint implements bear on their face the evidences 
of design and human workmanship, and of that, I think, 
there will be no question, as they bear certain characters 
well understood by experts, then we have evidence of man 
in a rude state of existence living in Ireland when the land 
was much more depressed beneath the waters of the ocean 
than now. Three of the flint flakes exhibited I extracted 
from about the middle of the consolidated bed of sand and 
gravel which constituted the older raised beach at Larne ; 
therefore this thick deposit must then have been in process 
of formation around the ancient shore of Antrim. 
Similar elevations of land as shown to have taken place 
in Ireland since the human period, have also occurred along 
the western shores of England and Scotland, as instanced by 
the same phenomena and the fact mentioned by Mr. Geikie 
in his great “ Great Ice Age ” of several canoes having been 
dug out of the 25 feet terrace along the estuary of the Clyde. 
A general elevation of land may have been synchronous 
on both sides of the channel, and Professor Hull, in a paper 
read before the British Association at Brighton in 1872, 
suggested the correlation of the raised beaches of Ireland 
and the British coasts as desirable. 
