to enable us to determine the relative age of these strata. In the Bedford gravel, last alluded to, some remains of Hippopotamus major and Elephas antiquus have been discovered, and an assemblage of land and freshwater shells of recent species, but not precisely the same as those of Biddenham.
One step at least we gain by the Bedford sections, which those of Amiens and Abbeville had not enabled us to make. They teach us that the fabricators of the antique tools, and the extinct mammalia coeval with them, were all post-glacial, or, in other words, posterior to the grand submergence of Central England beneath the waters of the glacial sea.
Flint Implements in a Freshwater Deposit at Hoxne in Suffolk.
So early as the first year of the present century, a remarkable paper was communicated to the Society of Antiquaries by Mr. John Frere, in which he gave a clear description of the discovery at Hoxne, near Diss, in Suffolk, of flint tools of the type since found at Amiens, adding at the same time good geological reasons for presuming that their antiquity was very great, or, as he expressed it, beyond that of the present world, meaning the actual state of the physical geography of that region. 'The flints,' he said, 'were evidently weapons of war, fabricated and used by a people who had not the use of metals. They lay in great numbers at the depth of about twelve feet in a stratified soil which was dug into for the purpose of raising clay for bricks. Under a foot and a half of vegetable earth was clay seven and a half feet thick, and beneath this one foot of sand with shells, and under this two feet of gravel, in which the shaped flints were found generally at the rate of five or six in a square yard. In the sandy beds with shells were found the jaw bone and teeth of an enormous unknown animal. The manner in which the
