so redeposited and mingled with the relics of human workmanship.
Far-fetched as was this hypothesis, I am informed that it would not, if
granted, have seriously shaken the proof of the high antiquity of human
productions; for that proof is independent of organic evidence or fossil
remains, and is based on physical data. As was stated to us last year
by Sir Charles Lyell, we should still have to allow time for great
denudation of the chalk, and the removal from place to place, and the
spreading out over the length and breadth of a large valley, of heaps of
chalk-flints in beds from ten to fifteen feet in thickness, covered
by loam and sands of equal thickness, these last often tranquilly
deposited,--all of which operations would require the supposition of a
great lapse of time."

An independent proof of the age of these gravel-beds and the associated
loam, containing fossil remains, is derived by the same authority from
the large deposits of peat in the valley of the Somme, which contain not
only monuments of the Roman, but also those of an older, stone period,
the Finnic period; yet, says Lord Wrottesley, "distinguished geologists
are of opinion that the growth of all the vegetable matter, and even
the original scooping out of the hollows containing it, are events long
posterior in date to the gravel with flint-implements,--nay, posterior
even to the formation of the uppermost of the layers of loam with
fresh-water shells overlaying the gravel."

The number of the flint implements is computed at above fourteen hundred
in an area of fourteen miles in length and half a mile in breadth. They
are of the rudest nature, as if formed by a people in the most degraded
state of barbarism. Some are mere flakes of flint, apparently used for
knives or arrow-heads; some are pointed and with hollowed bases, as if
for spear-heads, varying from four to nine inches in length; some are