31 
tools ! As my duties kept me in that locality for some years, I explored the 
whole country round. I was engaged in embanking, making roads, and in 
draining land, and I found that these flakes were scattered through the sub- 
soil over an area of about twenty miles in length and ten miles m breadth, 
and yet I am told that this was “ a manufactory of Palaeolithic tools ” ! Now, 
I will ask you to consider this theory in relation to one fact to which I will 
call attention. The manufactory required for the whole of the British navy 
at Keyham covers an area of j ust one square mile. According to those who say 
that these flakes at Croyde and its neighbourhood are evidence of a manufactory 
for a few scattered savages, the manufactory must have covered an area of 
two hundred square miles ! I put it to the common sense of those whom I 
am addressing,— could this have been a manufactory ? What to my mind is 
certain, and what I am ready to prove against all comers, is this : that these 
flint flakes have a geological and not an antiquarian origin. (Hear, hear.) 
Walking along the seashore, it can be seen that the flakes, which are found 
in the subsoil inland, and the resupposed to be “ nests of flakes,” are ex- 
posed in cliff sections, and may thus be traced for a considerable distance 
along the shore-line. I traced these flakes from the Scilly Isles, and found 
the drift of shattered flints again at the Land’s End, where they are 
scattered over an area of seven miles in length. I traced them beyond this 
to different places, namely, St. Ives, St. Agnes, Padstow, Hartland Point, 
and several of the headlands in that district and beyond Ilfracombe. 
I traced them, also, across the Channel to Caldy Island, and along the 
south coast of Wales ; and Sir Roderick Murchison has indicated by his 
map that these flakes are found on the western coast of Wales. They 
are scattered on the Isle of Man, and you may follow them until you 
come to the very spot where they originate, in the county of Antrim, at 
Carrickfergus, and Larne. In fact, on the other side of the Irish Sea, these 
so-called flint u implements” are scattered along the eastern coast of Ireland 
from Antrim as far as Ballycotton Bay in the county of Cork. This certainly 
looks as if we had found the origin of the flakes ; but there is more con- 
clusive evidence yet. The flint drift of Antrim is known by three well- 
recognized marks. In connection with this drift we find the indurated chalk 
known as the white limestone — a peculiar kind of limestone found in the 
north of Ireland, hardened by basalt. I have found at Scilly frequent 
examples of the basalt, and I have also noticed among those islands some of 
the burnt flints, such as are found at Antrim between the basalt and 
the chalk ; so that in this threefold cord, which cannot be easily broken, you 
may trace the origin of these flints to Antrim as surely and as completely as 
you can trace the origin of the negro to Africa. (Hear, hear.) And it 
should be noticed that these flints are not carried and scattered about as 
they would be if they had been used as gun-flints, or, in earlier times, as 
arrow-heads, but they are found in a regular geological stratum about two 
feet below the soil ; and what is more remarkable still, throughout the whole 
of Cornwall, as every surveying engineer in that part of the country knows, 
you will find under the soil a stratum of shattered quartz and hard stones 
