"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." (Antiquity of Man, p. 166.)
The river Waveney in Suffolk, which also flows over boulder clay, has left flint-bearing gravels some 50 feet above its present bed and at several points along its course, the most famous of which are in the vicinity of Hoxne. Similar implements have been found at many places within the valley of the Thames, as the neighbourhood of Herne Bay and Reculver. General Lane Fox (Quart. Geo. Journ., Lond., xxviii., p. 449) has described specimens, including a triangular flake and an oval scraper, in association with remains of the mammoth exposed in the gravels at Acton Church in London. They are also discovered in considerable numbers in gravels along the Medway, the Stour, and their tributaries. Similar implements have been recorded from the neighbourhood of Salisbury, especially at Bemerton and Fisherton, a goodly number of which are now preserved in the Blackmore Museum. With the exception of the bone caves of Devonshire, no palæoliths have been discovered further west than Axminster. The stone implements from the river gravels of England are precisely similar to those from analogous deposits in France, such as the well-known specimens found by M. Boucher de Perthes at Abbeville and Amiens, in the valley of the Somme. [1]
Fauna.
Coincident with the changes in the climate and physical geography of Europe, the flora and fauna of the country, which are so dependent on a uniform environment for the stability of their racial characters, could not fail to have been greatly affected. The result was the bringing together into Central Europe of a number of different species of animals, representing faunas so widely apart as those of subtropical and arctic regions. Dr Boyd Dawkins, whose accurate knowledge on the subject is
- ↑ It is unnecessary to dwell on the recorded discoveries of the river-drift implements and their distribution, as full details are given in works so accessible to the public as those of Lyell, Avebury, Evans, Boyd Dawkins, Hamy, de Mortillet, Déchelette, Stone Age Guide to the British Museum, etc.
