142 
Primceval Man in the Valley of the Lea. 
long is it since this Flustra lived in the sea, and particles of 
silex gathered round it and enclosed its form in this flint ? 
How long since that sea-bottom was uplieaved and became a 
chalky down ? How did the glacier or the melting ice break 
up the chalk and set the flint free for the Palaeolithic imple¬ 
ment-maker to find ? How came the implement when made 
to be buried under ten feet of gravel, and by what curious 
chance was it that thousands of years afterwards I walked 
into that Clapton gravel-pit and saw the implement embedded 
with the constituent stones of the drift in the pit-side? 
There is not an implement in my collection but plainly 
speaks and questions of facts like the above. I could easily 
occupy a long evening by repeating the things the imple¬ 
ments suggest—and not only suggest, but often prove to the 
careful student. 
We have now come to the point where the men themselves 
must be mentioned ; but how can the man be described when 
we have not even got his bony framework ? Prof. W. Boyd 
Dawkins tells us that the bones of drift-men at present found 
are insufficient to build up a single skeleton, and I should not 
be far wrong if I said that up to the present time there has 
not been a fragment of man’s bony fabric that can with 
positive certainty be referred to man of the River Drift. 
There is doubt about the authenticity of the osseous relics 
referred to River Drift man, and uncertainty regarding the 
circumstances of finding. It must be understood that I do 
not refer to men of the Caves, but to the far older tribes who 
lived on the river-margins and others who lived before the 
present rivers flowed. 
We know, then, the primaeval men were men as we 
now understand men to be, men with thinking heads, with 
correct eyes for beautiful and true forms, and with uncom¬ 
monly skilful fingers for the difficult task of making orna¬ 
mental and useful tools out of very intractable materials. 
We know that they chiefly lived in the open air, on stony 
river-banks, and that they picked up the stones at their feet 
wherewith to make their weapons and tools. We know 
that primaeval man lived in company with the Mammoth, 
