Collectanea,' vol. i. p. 73, it is stated to have been found in the presence of Mr. Conyers, with the skeleton of an elephant.[1]So many bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus have been found in the gravel on which London stands, that there is no reason to doubt the statement as handed down to us. Fossil remains of all these three genera have been dug up on the site of Waterloo Place, St. James's Square, Charing Cross, the London Docks, Limehouse, Bethnal Green, and other places within the memory of persons now living. In the gravel and sand of Shacklewell, in the northern suburbs of London, I have myself collected specimens of the Cyrena fluminalis in great numbers, see fig. 17 c, p. 124, with the bones of deer and other mammalia.
In the alluvium also of the Wey, near Guildford, in a place called Pease Marsh, a wedge-shaped flint implement, resembling one brought from St. Acheul, by Mr. Prestwich, and compared by some antiquaries to a sling-stone, was obtained in 1836 by Mr. Whitburn, four feet deep in sand and gravel, in which the teeth and tusks of elephants had been found. The Wey flows through the gorge of the North Downs at Guildford to join the Thames. Mr. Austen has shown that this drift is so ancient that one part of it had been disturbed and tilted before another part was thrown down.[2]
Among other places where flint tools of the antique type have been met with in the course of the last three years, I may mention one of an oval form found by Mr. Evans in the valley of the Darent, and another which the same observer found lying on the shore at Swalecliff, near Whitstable, in Kent, where Mr. Prestwich had previously described a freshwater deposit, resting on the London clay, and consisting chiefly of gravel, in which an elephant's tooth and the bones of a bear were embedded. The, flint implement was deeply
- ↑ Evans, Archæologia, 1860.
- ↑ Quarterly Geological Journal, 1851, vol. vii. p. 278.
