172 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN 
and recognised both their antiquity and their human 
origin. John Frere's discovery was forgotten until the 
year 1859, when Boucher de Perthes, after a struggle 
of twenty-five years, convinced the world in general and 
the leading English geologists in particular, that the 
curiously shaped flints in the terraces of the Somme — 
particularly those at St Acheul — were of human work- 
manship and fashioned when species of animals now 
extinct were alive. It was then that the importance of 
Frere's investigations at Hoxne was realised. Sir John 
Evans and Sir Joseph Prestwich visited Hoxne, and 
found the brick earths and Frere's implements. In 
1895-96, nearly a century after Frere's discovery, the 
British Association sent a Committee — its most active 
member being Mr Clement Reid — to investigate the 
relationship of the deposit of brick earth to that of 
boulder clay, a deposit resulting from the greatest of 
the Pleistocene glacial episodes. The annexed diagram 
(fig. 60) is compiled from the records of the Committee.^ 
The Committee found that the Hoxne brick earths, about 
7 feet in thickness, represented the topmost of a series 
of deposits filling an ancient valley which had been about 
50 feet in depth. The valley had been cut by a stream in 
the chalky boulder clay and the mid-glacial sands ; it was 
clear the Hoxne valley had been formed and filled after 
the time of the deposition of the boulder clay and the 
close of the major glaciation. The bottom of this 
ancient valley is rather below the present level of the 
valley of the Waveney. The lower 20 feet of the 
deposits filling the valley are composed of clay laid 
down in still, fresh water. Then follows a deposit 
containing remains of plants which prefer a temperate 
climate. Then another deposit, about 20 feet in depth, 
of black loam with remains of Arctic plants. Then, 
finally, a layer of gravel on which rest the brick earths. 
contauiing Acheulean flints 
An inspection of the strata at Hoxne convinces us that 
^tt Report of British Association for 1896 (Liverpool), Section C, 
p. I. 
