Well, I must leave Mr. Harrison to convert you into the friend or foe
of his eoliths, and will merely add a word in regard to the probable
age of these eolith-bearing gravels. Sir Joseph Prestwich has tried
to work the problem out. Now-a-days Kent and Sussex run eastwards in
five more or less parallel ridges, not far short of 1,000 feet high,
with deep valleys between. Formerly, however, no such valleys existed,
and a great dome of chalk, some 2,500 feet high at its crown, perhaps,
though others would say less, covered the whole country. That is why
rivers like the Darenth and Medway cut clean through the North Downs
and fall into the Thames, instead of flowing eastwards down the later
valleys. They started to carve their channels in the soft chalk in
the days gone by, when the watershed went north and south down the
slopes of the great dome. And the red gravels with the eoliths in them,
concludes Prestwich, must have come down the north slope whilst the
dome was still intact; for they contain fragments of stone that hail
from right across the present valleys. But, if the eoliths are man-made,
then man presumably killed game and cut it up on top of the Wealden
dome, how many years ago one trembles to think.

* * * * *

Let us next proceed to the subject of palaeoliths. There is, at any
rate, no doubt about them. Yet, rather more than half a century ago,
when the Abbe Boucher de Perthes found palaeoliths in the gravels of
the Somme at Abbeville, and was the first to recognize them for what
they are, there was no small scandal. Now-a-days, however, the world
takes it as a matter of course that those lumpish, discoloured, and
much-rolled stones, shaped something like a pear, which come from the
high terraces deposited by the Ancient Thames, were once upon a time
the weapons or tools of somebody who had plenty of muscle in his arm.