CREATION BY EVOLUTION
before the age of iron into a stout pin; and below this again was found a fine stone implement.
No one can doubt that in this old street of Winchester the ground had gradually risen layer by layer, and that each layer contained objects dropped by successive generations of men who lived while it was forming. From these facts alone one could learn much of the history of Winchester and could reconstruct that succession of cultures which, as we know from other facts (not to mention written documents), is applicable to at least the whole of England. These coins and pots and tools are fossils, and their orderly succession is everywhere the same, unless, indeed, the ground has been disturbed by subsequent building operations.
_p106_section_across_London_basin.png)
Fig. 2.—Diagrammatic section across the London basin.
If we dig deeper we shall come, it may be, to layers of gravel and brick-earth, as we do in London (Fig. 2); then to stiff clay, and below that to other harder rocks. Except perhaps in the upper gravels, we no longer come across the remains of man, but we find the bones and the shells of other animals, and these, we note, occur in just such regular succession as did the coins and pots. Are we not bound to make a similar inference and to say that the fossils indicate successive layers of rock and a succession of animal inhabitants? We do indeed find that the more closely we study any thickness of rock the more does each successive layer prove to contain its characteristic fossils. These layers can be seen and measured and traced across country, and so far
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