2-1 
are found in such abundance all over the western portion and the centre of 
England, as well as through almost every other country-have nothing to do 
with the Palaeolithic age, hut in reality belong to the Neolithic period down 
to the time of the Romans, and even more modern dates. Flint is one of 
those indestructible bodies which when once chipped into form, unless sub- 
sequently broken, retains the shape into which it was fashioned, and you 
may consequently find flints retaining at the present day the same form they 
possessed almost any number of years ago. When we consider the number 
of years during which all of us will acknowledge this country has been 
inhabited, and that for the purpose of producing fire, flint has been in use 
nearly the whole of that time;* and if we then take a population of a 
thousand for two or three square miles of country, and assume that for hre- 
innW purposes only one flint was chipped by each person in a year, and 
that that flint produced 20 splinters, you would thus have 20,000 flakes, and 
if you put the occupation of the country at 2,000 years, you would in that 
way have 40,000,000 flakes, or, as I would call them, the “ strike-a-lights 
of our ancestors. This, I say, is the reason why so many flints are 
found showing signs of blows upon them in the shape of that bulb ot per- 
cussion which the author of the paper contends does not give evidence o 
human manufacture. This bulb of percussion occurs where the splinter or flake 
of flint is dislodged from another piece of flint by means of a blow. The flint is 
to a certain extent compressible, and where the blow is administered, the 
body of the flake is driven slightly inwards, and the fracture being prolonged, 
produces either a cone or the section of a cone. You may in this way 
produce a beautiful conical surface on a flint, the cone extending m o e 
body of the flint sometimes as much as an inch. This brings me o e 
other objections that have been raised by the author of the paper; and ^here 
I may say that inasmuch as the paper which has been written y r. i ey 
* Flint was in use, even up to the year 1841, .in the met r°P 0 ^ 
countrv The mode of producing fire adopted m the present day in ■ > 
Australia the Pacific Islands, and indeed in all uncivilized countries, is y 
drilling or rubbing pieces of wood together ; and if we “H .“g* .“ t ^ 
usu.il wav from the present to the past, the earlier inhabitants ol th 
country must have produced fire in a similar ma^ 
f ir to tell us so. With regard to the next portion of Mr. Evans s ingenious 
theory! there is no record of any country ever having poss messed a populat ion 
•it the rate of 500 to the square mile. The present population of t 
United Kingdom is 292, of France, 200 to the sqnare mile ™e populat 
of England and Wales has greatly increased of late ; m 1871, it ^as twenty 
two and three-quarter millions (or at the rate of 389 to the square mile) , in 
imi T was nine millions ; and in 1550, four millions. The origin of the 
flint flakes of the Drift has been alluded to by many ; one writer has 
found a reason for the existence of the “strike-a-lights” of Mr. Evans m 
the action of the ice and boulders in the glacial age, action which must ha 
been very similar to that produced by Blake’s stone-crusher, specimens of 
the flakes formed by which were produced at the meeting ; these had many 
o? thfpec“es y alluded to by Mr. Evans as having been caused by a 
blow.— [E d.] 
