lyo THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN 
were intact and undisturbed. We have no guarantee of 
this kind in the case of the Dartford skull. In commercial 
ventures it is seldom that such a degree of verification is 
possible, and yet, if we insist rigidly on such conditions, 
we may reject the most valuable of documents and records. 
We should further expect that other bones besides those 
of man should occur at the same level, but at the Dart- 
ford pit no animal remains were observed. Further, we 
should expect the skull to show a high degree of mineral- 
isation — or fossilisation — but the Dartford skull is not 
heavy. Its surface is weathered, pitted, and of a light 
brown colour ; when a fragment is broken, the freshly 
fractured surface is grey and chalky. The condition 
does not suggest, but it does not exclude, a high antiquity. 
There is one remarkable feature to be seen on the 
inner surface of the cranium. The skull apparently lay, 
while embedded in the gravel, with its right side down 
and its left up. There was a perforation on the upper or 
left side, at which a drip of water must have entered, and 
then have passed round the inner aspect of the vault, 
making its exit at a small hole on the right or deep side 
of the skull. The drip has worn a groove or channel in 
the bone, about lo mm. wide and 3 mm. deep. The ear- 
holes contained a brown, sandy loam similar to that found 
in the pit. Further, the skull shows no signs of battering 
or erosion ; it could not have rolled far in the moving 
gravel in the bed of a stream. As a document, then, the 
Dartford skull is inconclusive. We cannot cite it as 
evidence that men of the modern type lived in England 
during the Acheulean period ; yet we cannot reject it, for 
it is probably authentic. 
To visit the site of the discovery of part of a human 
skull which can be assigned to the Acheulean period 
with some degree of surety we must leave the valley of 
the Thames for an interval and visit East Anglia, where 
the older deposits of the Pleistocene period are represented 
more completely and consecutively than in any other part 
of England — perhaps more fully than in any part of 
Europe. Our quest takes us to the town of Bury St 
