PrimcBval Man in the Valley of the Lea. 103 
Tlie precursors of the river-side men have, as far as we 
know, left no implements of stone for recognition; it is 
probable that the very earliest men used naturally-broken 
splinters and flakes of stone as tools and weapons. At last 
the time arrived when some individual discovered that by 
striking a hard, tough stone—like a quartzite pebble—on to 
a hard and brittle one like a block of flint, that sharp knife¬ 
like splinters, slices, or flakes would fly off from the flint, and 
these splinters were the first artificially-made implements 
used by the earliest men. The discovery of the art of 
splintering or flaking was quite possibly unpremeditated, and 
arose from seeing a block of flint accidentally shattered. 
The ancient river-side men, to whom I refer as primaeval 
men, are everywhere known as Palaeolithic men, because 
they were the men who fabricated the most ancient stone 
implements yet accepted as undoubted human work. The 
rough unpolished stone implements of the Palaeolithic men 
are distinguished in various ways from the tools made by the 
Neolithic men of later times. The former and more ancient 
tools are commonly found embedded in undisturbed gravel, 
sand, or loam, in company with fossil bones belonging to 
animals many of which are now extinct. These implements 
are never polished, and they are often abraded or water-worn, 
owing to then 1 being transported and washed about by the 
ancient stream on whose banks they were made. Neolithic im¬ 
plements, or implements belonging to a very much more recent 
period, are generally found on or but little beneath the sur¬ 
face ; they are frequently partly or wholly polished, and the 
bones found with them are neither in a fossil nor semi-fossil 
condition. 
It is to the works of the Palaeolithic men—and chiefly those 
men who formerly lived in the Lea Valley—that I now pro¬ 
pose to direct attention. These old river-side men lived 
on the ancient stony banks of the Lea; they picked up the 
flints that were at their feet, and from these stones fabricated 
then 1 weapons and tools. Successive floods of river-water, 
often slight, repeatedly covered up these flint tools with sand, 
loam, or gravel; and now, when excavations are made in the 
