Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/182

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164
SECTION ACROSS THE VALLEY OF THE OUSE.
CHAP. IX.

French types figured at pp. 114, 115. Both specimens were thrown out by the workmen on the same day from the lowest bed of stratified gravel and sand, thirteen feet thick, containing bones of the elephant, deer, and ox, and many fresh-water shells. The two implements occurred at the depth of thirteen feet from the surface of the soil, and rested immediately on solid beds of oolitic limestone, as represented in the accompanying section.

Fig. 23

Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man Fig. 23.png

Section across the Valley of the Ouse, two miles WNW. of Bedford.


1 Oolitic strata.

2 Boulder clay, or marine northern drift, rising to about ninety feet above the Ouse.

3 Ancient gravel, with elephant bones, freshwater shells, and flint implements.

4 Modern alluvium of the Ouse.

a Biddenham gravel pits, at the bottom of which flint tools were found.

I examined these pits, in 1861, in company with Messrs. Prestwich, Evans, and Wyatt, and we collected ten species of shells from the stratified drift No. 3, or the beds overlying the lowest gravel from which the flint implements had been exhumed. They were all of common fluviatile and land species now living in the same part of England. Since our visit, Mr. Wyatt has added to them Paludina marginata Michaud (Hydrobia of some authors, see p. 225 infra), species of the South of France no longer inhabiting the British Isles. The same geologist has also found, since we were at Biddenham, several other flint tools of corresponding type, both there and at other localities in the Valley of the Ouse, near Bedford.

The boulder clay, No. 2, extends for miles in all directions, and was evidently once continuous from b to c, before the