144 Notes on the Geological Position of the Human 
by Mr. Whitaker that “the general tendency of the Thames 
has been to cut its channel further and further southward, as 
it is on the north that we find the widest tracts of the old 
river-gravels, and on the south that the river comes nearest 
to the hills.” 7 Now this tendency is nowhere so markedly 
shown as in the contrast between its shores at Gravesend and 
Tilbury. On the Kentish side we have chalk to the water’s 
edge, and it is evident that the channel of the Thames at 
Gravesend and Rosherville was never southward of its present 
position. Turning, on the other hand, to the Essex shore, 
we see that a line drawn due north from Tilbury Fort, Docks, 
or Railway Station, would cross an alluvial flat about a mile 
and a half in breadth. Now where there is more or less 
alluvium on both shores it must be impossible to have any 
grounds for supposing remains deposited in a former channel, 
on one side, to be either earlier or later in date than other 
remains similarly deposited, but on the opposite shore of the 
present stream, and at an equal distance from it. But in the 
present instance it seems to me that we may fairly presume 
the river to have been occupied for many centuries in slowly 
and steadily cutting its channel further and further south¬ 
ward. Consequently human or other remains deposited in its 
channel when it flowed a mile due north of Tilbury Docks 
would be almost certainly older than the skeleton recently 
found. 8 And any estimate of age, derived from calculations 
as to the rate of deposition of the inundation-mud above the 
Tilbury man, is made additionally uncertain by the existence 
of the two stationary intervals marked by the peaty beds. 
I will now briefly review the evidence as to the Neanderthal 
skeleton and its age. It was found, in 1857, in a limestone 
cavern near Diisseldorf, 60 ft. above the River Dfissel, a 
tributary of the Rhine. This cavern opened on to the face of 
the river-cliff on one side, and was found to have a partly filled, 
up fissure communicating with the upper surface of the 
country, 100 ft. above, on the other. A section showing the 
✓ f 
7 ‘ Geology of the London Basin’ (1872), p. 381. 
8 We learned from Mr. Pinker, in May, that the skeleton was found in 
the tidal basin or dock nearest to the Thames. 
