1876 .] Deposits containing Flint Implements . 297 
in post-glacial times, whilst those at Syleham, being capped 
by boulder clay, he of necessity classifies as middle glacial. 
Yet I could find no difference whatever in their appearance 
or composition. In both, the pebbles are mostly small and 
subangular, with some rounded ones of quartz and quartzite. 
Both contain many small pebbles of chalk in their lowest 
seams, and both are false-bedded. That one is covered with 
boulder clay and the other by sandy “ trail does not suffice 
to prove them of different age, for at the Oakley gravel-pit 
we can trace the same gravels from one end, where the 
boulder clay overlies them, to the other, where the “ trail ” 
does so. The middle sands and gravels are generally sup- 
posed by geologists to be marine, and it is incredible that 
deposits due to such different agencies as that of the waves 
of the ocean beating on a beach, and that of a flooded river, 
should be absolutely identical in appearance and compo- 
sition. But nowhere is either the ocean or any river known 
to be forming deposits of subangular pebbles, excepting 
where they are cutting into pre-existing beds of the middle 
glacial series. Both in sea and in river beaches the pebbles 
are smoothly rounded, and not, as in the gravels under con- 
sideration, broken and subangular. Even when we find in 
the latter rounded pebbles of tertiary age, there is often a 
piece chipped out of them, as if they had been dashed vio- 
lently together. I have had a large number of the pebbles 
from the gravel at Ealing counted, and find that over 80 per 
cent are broken or subangular. I ask where, in the whole 
world, is such a deposit being formed by existing agencies ? 
Surely if ordinary floods would produce them they have had 
plenty of opportunities of doing so during the past pluvial 
year, yet where, on the banks of any of our rivers, have the 
great floods left deposits even approaching in character to 
those that geologists confidently ascribe to river adtion ? 
That they were caused by a great flood I fully believe, though 
not to that of any river, but to one that swept over the whole 
country, driving a huge mass of gravel and sand, and leaving 
them mantling both hills and valleys, holding or covering up 
the remains of palaeolithic man and the great mammals 
that had lived before the waters were pent up by the Atlantic 
glacier. 
A little above Hoxne, on the left side of the stream called 
the Gold Brook, is the Hoxne clay-pit. The clay is excavated 
along the slope of the shallow valley through which the 
brook runs. The road to Eye skirts the hill side, having to 
the west the park of Sir Edward Kerrison, and to the east, 
between it and the stream, a narrow strip of land from which 
