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The Chairman* having conveyed the thanks of the meeting to Mr. 
Whitley, — 
Mr. Whitley — who exhibited a collection of geological specimens to 
illustrate the paper — said, that for the last eight or ten years, as a civil 
engineer, he had had opportunities of observing shattered flints throughout 
the South of England, from the Scilly Islands to Norfolk, and from Belgium 
to the southern provinces of France. As to the flints which he now exhi- 
bited, some were from the subsoil, and some were struck off by Blake’s 
stone-crusher, both sets, of course, consisting of selected specimens. The 
flints from the stone-crusher had received their present shape undesignedly 
and unintellectually, being crushed by simple pressure in Blake’s machine, 
but from them it was very easy to pick out some admirable specimens of 
flint flakes, cores, scrapers, and knives ; precisely similar to those subsoil 
u flint implements ” said to have been formed by the hand of man. The flint 
flakes, some of which were beautiful examples of the so-called Palaeolithic arrow- 
heads, were scattered by thousands over parts of Devonshire and Cornwall. 
Mr. W. S. Mitchell said it was easy to understand how flints would 
get fractured in a crushing-machine, but he wanted to know how the sub- 
soil flints had become fractured. 
Mr. Whitley said he was not able to say positively what power had pro- 
duced the form in which the subsoil flints were found, but there could be no 
doubt that at one time England was as cold and icy a region as Greenland 
is now, and covered with an enormous mass of moving ice, which would 
exert even a greater force upon the stones beneath it, than the most 
powerful stone-crusher of modern times. It was remarkable that in the 
common land cultivated by the miners in Cornwall the same geological 
formation was found, and in the subsoil there was a layer of crushed 
quartz mixed up with the crushed flints. Now, no one would contend 
that the quartz was crushed by man, and it was evident that the same 
power which crushed the quartz had also crushed the flints. Of course 
he could not say what happened ten thousand years ago, but it was 
generally admitted that glacial action had crushed the stones on the surface 
of the earth. 
Mr. Mitchell still thought the operation of glacial action would be 
different from that of a stone-crusher. He supposed the stone-crusher acted 
by percussion ? 
Mr. Whitley said that was not so : the action of the stone-crusher arose 
from simple pressure, without percussion. 
The Chairman remarked that the operation of the stone-crusher might.be 
very aptly compared to the action of a moving glacier. 
Mr. Whitley said that he had seen very good flakes produced by a cart- 
wheel travelling over a flint, and, of course, there was no sudden blow in that 
case : it was simple pressure without percussion. Some twenty years ago it 
* C. Brooke, Esq., F.R.S., V.P. 
