DEPARTMENT OF 
GEOLOGY AND PALAEONTOLOGY. 
INTRODUCTION. 
Nearly every city has within its bounds some relics of earlier 
times, when a more ancient people occupied the same spot. 
Thus below modern London we find various layers of 
accumulated soil, each marked by tokens of former times. 
In one we find the charred relics of the wooden buildings 
which preceded the more modern brick and stone houses ; be- 
neath this are found weapons, coins, and pottery, telling of 
Norman and Saxon times. More than 20 feet down we come 
upon the relic-bed of Roman London, and in some parts two 
Roman periods have been recognised with remains of buildings 
at different depths. At a still lower level, along the course of 
the ancient Wall-brook, remnants of pile-dwellings have been 
discovered, which were probably occupied by an earlier British 
race. 
In the ancient gravels of the Thames Valley, both beneath 
and around London, stone implements, left by a yet earlier 
people, have been frequently met with, associated with bones 
and teeth of the Mammoth. 
If in a similar manner we investigate those larger layers of 
Chalk and Limestone, Sandstone, Clay, or Slate, composing the 
Earth’s crust, we not only find that they rest upon one another, 
so that we can judge of their relative age by the order of their 
superposition, but that, like the layers of soil below London, 
they are often full of relics which tell of the former inhabitants 
that lived, flourished, and died out, to be succeeded by another 
race which have in their turn shared the same fate. 
