36 
at the Queen-street railway station at Exeter on the 12th of 
October, 1876, for the train, I observed that the railway was bal- 
lasted with chert gravel of a peculiar form, and a search of a few 
minutes produced two rough tools of the Somme type, and 
at most of the stations eastward as far as Basingstoke, among 
similar gravel, similar forms caught my eye. On arriving in 
London I wrote a letter to the btaiulard, in which I drew the 
conclusion, that if the asserted tools from Brixham Cavern and 
from the drift-beds were implements, then the South-Western 
Eailway was ballasted with flint implements from Exeter to 
Basingstoke, a distance of at least 110 miles. This letter was 
replied to by Mr. S. G. Perceval, of Beer, and by Mr. P. 0. 
Hutchinson, of Sidmouth, both asserting that no palaeolithic 
implements had been found at Broom, or in that neighbour- 
hood ; and Mr. Hutchinson intimated that I had been blinded 
by seeing with my own eyes, and deceived by judging by my 
preconceived prejudices. The result, however, proved that 
both my eyes and my head were faithful to the trust which 
I reposed in them. 
Mr. D^Urban, the intelligent Curator of the Albert Memorial 
Museum at Exeter, seeing the published letters, instituted a 
search of the ballast of the railway and the gravel-pit at 
Broom ; and with the aid of the workmen obtained about 
fifty implements of the drift type, which are now iu the 
Exeter Museum. Several of these flints from the ballast of 
the railway are stained with the oil dropping from the loco- 
motive engines in passing over the line. 
At the meeting of the Anthropological Institute, on the 
9th of December, 1879, Mr. Worthington G. Smith, E.L.S., 
exhibited a series of sixty ^ palaeolithic implements,^ princi- 
pally from the Valley of the Axe.^^ The President, Mr. E. B. 
Tylor, remarking that, — ^‘^For the rude and heavy palaeolithic 
type of instruments [sfc], the specimens now exhibited showed 
the local chert to be a tolerable material, though quite unsuited 
to the finer flakes and arrow-heads of the Neolithic age."’^ I 
have obtained several of these implements,^^ which I now 
exhibit ; it will be seen that they vary much in size and in 
form ; that there is no secondary chipping on their edges, 
but indications that the edges have been bruised by being 
rolled in the gravel. 
I have inspected this gravel-pit at Broom on two occasions, — ■ 
the slopes of the hills on each side of the valley, and also the 
gravel on the hill-tops. The pit is an open excavation into a 
mass of chert-gravel, which forms the lower slope of a spur of 
a hill on the eastern side of the valley ; it has been excavated 
to the level of the rails, and exposes a perfect section of the 
