298 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN 
" Several years ago I was walking along a farm-road 
close to Piltdown Common, Fletching (Sussex), when I 
noticed that the road had been mended with some peculiar 
brown flints, not usual in the district. On inquiry, 1 was 
astonished to learn that they were dug from a gravel bed 
on the farm, and shortly afterwards I visited the place, 
where two labourers were at work digging the gravel for 
small repairs to the roads. As this excavation was situated 
four miles north of the limit where the occurrence of 
flints overlying the Wealden strata is recorded, I was 
much interested and made a close examination of the bed. 
I asked the workmen if they had found bones or other 
fossils there. As they did not appear to have noticed 
anything of the sort, I urged them to preserve anything 
that they might find. Upon one of my subsequent visits 
to the pit, one of the men handed to me a small portion 
of an unusually thick human parietal ^ bone. I im- 
mediately made a search, but could find nothing more ; 
nor had the men noticed anything else. The bed is full 
of tabular pieces of iron-stone closely resembling this 
piece of skull in colour and thickness ; and although 1 
made many subsequent searches, I could not hear of any 
further find nor discover anything — in fact, the bed 
seemed to be quite unfossiliferous. 
" It was not until some years later, in the autumn of 
191 1, on a visit to the spot, that I picked up, among the 
rain-washed spoil-heaps of the gravel pit, another and 
larger piece belonging to the frontal region of the same 
skull, including a portion of the left superciliary ridge. 
As I had examined a cast of the Heidelberg jaw, it 
occurred to me that the proportions of this skull were 
similar to those of that specimen. I accordingly took it 
to Dr A. Smith Woodward at the British Museum 
(Natural History) for comparison and determination. 
He was immediately impressed with the importance of 
the discovery, and we decided to employ labour and to 
make a systematic search among the spoil-heaps and 
' The right and left " parietal " bones form the greater part of the roof 
and sides of the brain cavity of the skull. 
