7 
some force that had not been violent in its action, but had 
simply divided them and not scattered the fragments. 
“ Materials being in this way continually supplied from a 
mountain, then being broken by the sun and afterwards 
buried in the sand, may perhaps give a clue to the origin of 
certain breccias.” * 
These suggestive observations lead us to notice the instruc- 
tive fact, that these sharp splinters of flint are found in great 
abundance on the surface of uninhabited and uninhabitable 
deserts, and are but rarely found in the rich alluvial valleys 
which have been the birthplace of ancient nations. They occur 
on the Great Sahara, -j- on the Libyan desert, J on the sterile 
terraces and slopes which border the Nile, but not on its rich 
alluvial soil ; § they are most abundant in the stony valleys of 
the Sinaitic peninsula, || and on the desert of the Tih ;^[ they 
are embedded in cliff breccias on the death-stricken shores of 
the Dead Sea,** and scattered over the central ridge of Syria, and 
they so abound on the surface of that great and terrible desert 
between the Jordan and the Euphrates as to have given it the 
name of the “ Desert of Flints .”++ 
Tradition, history, and the necessities of the case all agree in 
their testimony that the rich alluvial valleys of the Euphrates 
and the Nile were the cradle in which the human family was 
nursed in its infancy ; but on their fertile soils no relics of 
paleolithic man have been found. According to modern 
theories of his origin, he came to the very verge of fertility, and 
beheld a Paradise before him replete with all the necessaries 
and luxuries of savage life, and then turned back into the desert 
to manufacture flint implements, where there was no soil tG 
cultivate, and no animal food to sustain life. That these 
sterile deserts could have supported a population sufficiently 
large to have made the innumerable so-called implements is as 
false in fact as it is wild in theory. 
With all this mass of evidence in support of the natural 
formation of the flakes, to persist in calling these pieces of 
rubble flint and fragmentary flakes from Brixham Cavern, 
“ thirty-six rude flint implements of indisputable human work- 
manship,” and that not only without evidence, but against 
evidence, is a delusion, a deception, and a snare. 
* J ournal of the Geological Society, vol. xxxi. p. 26. f Canon Tristram, 
t Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. iv. p. 360. 
§ Ibid. ,vol. iv. p. 215. 
|| See specimens in the Museum of Practical Geology. 
1 J' ournal of the Geological Society, vol. xxxi. p. 26. 
** Lynch’s Survey, p. 274, and Tristram’s Travels in Palestine, p. 253. 
ft Bible Atlas , plate 2. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 
