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the fight went on for six months, and then he was obliged to admit that it was 
a roebuck. He (the speaker) fully agreed with the general results at which 
Dr. Southall and Mr. Dawkins had arrived. There was one feature in the 
history of Pliocene upon which he would like to say something, and it was 
this. In the Suffolk Pliocene crag there had been discovered, during the 
past forty years, countless millions of sharks’ teeth. In his young days, he 
used to go and look in the Suffolk Crag quarries for fossils, and he was in 
the habit of finding any number of shells ; but his greatest prizes were the 
sharks’ teeth. When Professor Henslow, who was very fond of geology, was 
presented, in the year 1842, to a living in Suffolk, he came to the conclusion 
that certain stones in the Pliocene crag contained phosphates of lime, and he 
maintained that the stones, if ground up, might be used for manure. The 
result was that all that part of Suffolk where the Pliocene crags existed was 
found to be extremely wealthy, for all the farmers dug up these stones and 
utilised them for manure. One of the results of this was that, whereas in 
his (the speaker’s) early days, he would occasionally find a shark’s tooth 
among the shells, the men engaged in shifting the stones found them by 
thousands. He bought up about 20,000 of them, and, on turning them over 
was surprised to find that some had a hole drilled through them. Some might 
be familiar with the dreadful weapons made by the South Sea Islanders. 
These weapons were made thus ; — a piece of wood was cut into the shape 
of a dagger, and a groove was made down each side of it ; into this 
groove the teeth were placed, and, in order to keep them in position, a 
hole was drilled through each of them, and a strong piece of binding put 
through the holes, the result being a most dangerous weapon. Well, the 
moment he found the drilled hole in his sharks’ teeth he thought, — “ Why, 
surely primitive man was here. Here we have really Pliocene man.” He 
went through all his sharks’ teeth, and altogether he thought he found eight 
with the hole drilled through them. He sent them to Professor Owen, 
who wrote a report stating that he really believed the drilling was human 
work. There was not a shadow of a doubt that these teeth were 
really of Pliocene age. The workman who sold them knew nothing about 
the hole, and did not know that the teeth were of any extra value when 
pierced in this way. Now came the question : were these holes, which 
exactly agreed with the holes in the South Sea Island teeth, human work or 
the work of some animal, — some mollusk or a worm which had the power of 
drilling hard substances ? This was a matter of the greatest possible interest. 
If it was human work, then man was undoubtedly of Pliocene date. But 
was it human work or not ? They all knew there were certain shell- fish 
which had that wonderful power of tunnelling their way into the hardest 
rock. One took a stone and threw it into the sea, and a year or two after- 
wards found that it was tunnelled through and through. He was not now 
speaking of the ship- worm, but a worm that drilled through the hardest 
rock, and that, a creature no harder than an oyster and with its early 
shells as thin as a piece of paper. Had those shell-fish tunnelled into the 
