The greater part of the northern side of the parish of Beechamwell consists of marl and chalk with a top-soil of from one to eighteen feet of gravelly sand. The average depth of this is about eight feet. On the top of it there is a layer of turf or of cultivable soil from three-quarters of a foot to a foot and a-half in depth. There is a narrow strip of boulder clay deposit on which ice-scratched, worked flints are found. There is also a tongue of gravel one and a-half-mile long and half-a-mile wide at its widest part. On this, generally, very few worked flints have been found; fragments of pottery in some numbers have been found all over it however. On the edge of this strip, adjacent on the west to the boulder clay, several worked flints have been picked up, and a hoard of about 200 splinters and flakes was found lying between the sand and the turf, a foot deep here.

The greater part of the worked flints are found in an area of about half-a-mile square. The axes, whole or in fragments, are found scattered over the whole of the northern half of the parish. The first axe, however, I found was lying beside a path through the old fen that lies on the south side of Beechamwell. The worked flints found near the moraine are of a peculiar grey colour, and nearly all scimitar-shaped.

Flints are found in beds in the chalk and are still plentiful on the surface of the soil, although many have been picked off it for building and road-mending. The small area on which the worked flints are so numerous is the highest ground in Beechamwell.

In 1884 I was initiated into the study ot flint and its fracture while accompanying Mr. John French, of Felstead, Essex, on his rambles alter “Chipped Flints,” some of which were for many years accepted as Palæolithic implements. From 1887-92 my apprenticeship continued under the late John Allen Brown, F.G.S., who did so much pioneer work among the Thames gravels. From those days to the present I have spent most of my spare time “Flint-hunting” in Essex, East Anglia, and the London District.

From 1896 to 1900 (in view of the geological positions in which they were found), I gradually became dissatisfied with the law laid down by authorities, that facetted flints and bulbous flakes were prıma facie evidence of Man; and I began to wonder whether man had really made them, or whether Nature in her diverse methods had chipped them during the more recent geological formations. These doubts were strengthened in 1906 by the discovery that my treasured Palæos from Felstead were probably derived from the base of the Westleton gravels, which out-cropped near the fields in which we found them. In a pit I found chipped and facetted flints of absolutely meaningless shape.

A paper in Vol. I., Part III., of the “Proceedings,” on “Pygmy Implements from Cornwall,” by E. L. Arnold, has spurred me on to place on record my discoveries on the same spot.

During the years 1898 to 1903 I paid numerous visits to the western side of Trevose Head, Booby Bay, Constantine Island, and also to the Late Celtic Cemetery at Harlyn Bay, one mite N.E. Flint flakes and cores or cones lay on the surface of the ground, at the cliff edge, all the way from Dinas Head (the western-most corner of the Trevose promontory, and a splendid look-out place), down to Booby Bay and Constantine Island. They had evidently once been covered with soil and are now exposed by the wastage thereof near the cliff edge. Some I dug out from the banks of tiny runlets formed after heavy rain.

Mr. Arnold says that “the artificers appear to have turned out immense numbers of barbs and arrow-points, but practically nothing else.” Like him, I found many hundreds of chipped flints, leaving quantities of them where I found them, after examination. But I found no true arrow-head. None of the pygmy tools were of especial smallness, but some were straight and sharply pointed, and I suggested, in “Man,” Vol. VII., No. 9, 83, their possible use as barbs to harpoons and also as fish hooks.

One flake, however, has been cleverly snicked from the base to half-way up its length, on each side, so as to leave two projecting shoulders as barbs, and a tang. It is carefully retouched round the edges on one face only. It has curved edges and a narrow, sharp chisel end.

On Friday, October 6th, 1911, I received a message from Mr. Laughlin, of Messrs. Bolton & Laughlin, brickmakers, Ipswich, to the effect that one of his workmen, while removing some surface clay to get at the underlying glacial gravel, had turned out some human bones. I at once went down to the pit where the discovery had been made and found that a portion of a human skull attached to an almost complete cranial cast had been recovered. The workmen pointed out that two bones were protruding from the spot whence the skull had been derived, and so it was arranged for the remainder of the skeleton to be dug up on the following day. Messrs. Woolnough, Canton, and Snell accompanied me, and we afterwards drew up a short report of our observations. This report is as follows:—

“We, the undersigned, were present at, and superintended, the digging out of the human remains found at Messrs. Bolton & Laughlin's pit, Ipswich, on Saturday, October 7th, 1911. We all most carefully examined the section of decalcified Boulder Clay, under which the bones lay, before any digging commenced, and were absolutely convinced that no grave had ever been dug on the spot before.

During the successive Glacial periods which seem to have occurred at regular intervals and of increasing or diminishing intensity, what were the climatic conditions in the present tropical regions?

This is dated from Southern India, where I am endeavouring to visualise and imagine some of the climatic conditions in which ancient man at some of these periods may have lived, and in which the implements, of which I am finding some beautiful examples, may have been made and used and subsequently abandoned, being now found in certain positions and horizons.

Cuddapah is the chief town of a district where I have found most of the implements of palæolithic type of which I have given series to, I suppose, more than a hundred museums. If I include African and Egyptian implements, then the number of museums and institutions is 246 in all. Cuddapah is pretty well searched out now as regards implements, as there is a native whom Mr. McLeod, the late Collector of Cuddapah, trained as a searcher, and who has usually been with me and who is with me on the present occasion, who has searched most of that district in my company. Dr. Sturge has very beautifully and clearly applied the Draysonian theory to certain questions in prehistorics. While man in Northern Europe was being driven backwards and forwards, and alternately scorched and frozen for thousands of years, alternating with long periods of comparative climatic repose such as we are now enjoying, what, I ask, was happening to his confrère in India? As far as I can ascertain from the evidential positions and surroundings of such palæolithic implements as I have myself picked up, the climate in this part of the world was devoid of those catastrophic floods and alternating Arctic and Tropical climates which must have made life so exciting in other latitudes.

About ten years ago some labourers engaged in excavating gravel from a pit on the estate of Mr. A. Wood Crawshay, J.P., in the parish of Scole, Norfolk, brought to light a number of iron spear-heads, a quantity of fragmentary pottery, a small ornamented object of bronze, and several bones. No effort was made to discover the positions these various objects occupied in relation to each ether, but it was ascertained that they were all deposited in some trenches about six feet long and three feet wide, cut in the surface soil of the ground bordering the pit. Through the kindness of Mr. Crawshay, I was able to exhibit some of these relics at a meeting of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, held at Norwich, on March 22nd, 1909, and the conclusion come to concerning them was that they represented interments of the Roman period. Six spear-heads were found, two being uninjured apart from corrosion, while the remaining four were broken, one having lost the whole of its blade.

Owing to the continued expression of interest in the Red Crag Shell, which bears a crude carving of a human face upon it, and which my father first described so many years ago, the time seems ripe to collect the evidence regarding it. I wrote a letter to the “Geological Magazine” summarising the facts of the case, and giving the literature of the subject, and this was followed by a later note.

Many geologists and others have expressed themselves as desirous of seeing the shell, round which discussion and more or less heated opinion has revolved for thirty-two years. It was shown at the London meeting of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, when the President, Dr. Sturge, proposed that a committee should be formed critically to examine and report on it. In the present paper, therefore, I shall confine myself to stating its history, and bringing together what little contemporary evidence there is regarding its discovery.

It is my purpose in this paper to tabulate and describe some of the details of flint fracture, which, in my opinion, are very necessary for the prehistorian to understand and recognise, and a knowledge of which makes the study of flint implements much easier and more entertaining. The correctness of some of my explanations of these various details may be challenged, but the majority of them are, I think, in accord with the views of most investigators and will be generally accepted.

A part of the ground which will be traversed in this paper has already been gone over, but I am anxious to put all the facts at present ascertained regarding the fracture of flint into a compact form which can easily be referred to and may be of use to serious prehistorians. I hope that this will be considered sufficient excuse for recapitulating some of the facts which have already been brought forward.

Striking Platforms. When an ordinary rounded nodule of flint is selected with a view to produce an implement from it by flaking, it is necessary, owing to the difficulty of removing flakes from a rounded or irregular surface, to break off a portion of the nodule so that a flat surface is produced from which flakes can be struck with precision. The flakes which are removed will exhibit, just above the point where the blows fell which detached them (known as “the point of impact”), a portion of this flat surface, and this is termed the “striking platform.”

Mr. Moir has described the circumstances under which the skeleton was found and has given the evidence on which these bones have been assigned to the period preceding the formation of the Boulder Clay. It remains for me to give a description of the skeleton and to draw certain inferences as to the kind of man to which it belonged. Before doing so, however, I should like to mention a matter which may be of service to future investigators. So fragile were the remains, such was the degree of disintegration, that Mr. Moir found it impossible to extract the bones from the matrix in which they were embedded. He therefore, most wisely, cut out the stratum in which the bones lay as solid blocks, which were forwarded to me in the condition in which they were excavated. On reaching the Museum we impregnated each block with a solution of gelatine and then proceeded to expose the bones by removing from them the overlying boulder clay piecemeal and leaving them still in situ on the underlying glacial sands. The removal of the boulder clay required extreme care and great patience, but the advantage of leaving the bones attached to the underlying parts of the blocks became very apparent when we came to reconstruct the position of parts of the skeleton.

I have read with much interest the Report of the Committee appointed on 12th February, 1913, to examine such evidence as exists bearing upon the question whether the shell from the Red Crag of Walton-on-the-Naze (a single valve of Pectunculus glycimeris which belonged to the late Mr Henry Stopes, and has rude human features engraved upon it) is a genuine work of art of the Crag or pre-Crag period or a modern fabrication; and I desire to offer a few remarks thereon.

I may say at the outset that I have been familiar with this very puzzling shell for a long period; for I was present, on the 6th September, 1881, in the Anthropological Section of the British Association, during its Jubilee Meeting at York, when Mr. Stopes exhibited the shell and read an account of its known history. As to the Walton Cliffs and the Red Crag sections appearing therein, I knew them well years before.

The Committee has not only examined minutely and discussed fully in its Report the shell itself, the amount of staining it presents, the manner of the cutting of the lines incised upon it, the amount of sand lodged in them, and other points of interest which it presents, but has also enquired exhaustively into the history of the discovery of the shell, so far as this can now be ascertained. It has done all this with an amount of care and thoroughness which deserves high praise.

At the suggestion of the President it was agreed to appoint a Special Committee to examine the shell forming the subject of Dr. Stopes' paper, and to report upon it. A Committee was accordingly formed consisting of the President of the Society (Dr. Allen Sturge), the Vice-President (Mr. J. Reid Moir, F.G.S.), the Secretary (Mr. W. G. Clarke), and Mr. W. H. Burrell, F.L.S.; the President to act as Chairman.

By invitation of the President, the Committee met at Icklingham Hall from May 17th to 19th. Dr. Marie Stopes was also present, to be responsible for the safety of the specimen and to give such further information as the Committee might desire.

In my Presidential Address delivered at the first meeting of the Society in 1908 I referred to the possibility that we might be able to trace in this part of the world the various periods which have hitherto been chiefly associated with deposits in rockshelters and caves in France and elsewhere. The object of the present paper is to bring before the members of the Society the present position of this question so far as my own researches are concerned with a view to stimulating further enquiries into the subject.

Before passing to details it will be necessary to give a brief account of the scope of the enquiry and to sum up our knowledge of the rock shelter and Cave periods of the Palæolithic Age so far as it is possible to do so. To give an adequate up-to-date description of the subject is not a very easy matter, for so far as I am aware no detailed account of the various Cave periods has been written in recent time, and advances in knowledge have to be sought for in the periodical publications of many different societies of various countries, a task which to most of us who are not within reach of a first-class library is practically impossible. Even when these can be consulted it rarely happens in my experience that sufficient attention is paid by illustration and description to the many varieties of types of implement associated with the different periods.

The flint implements with which we are concerned as prehistoriaus, and to which we look for evidence of the existence of early man and of the degree of culture to which he had attained, may owe their origin either to the agency of nature or to that of man.

It is of the greatest importance to us that we should be able to distinguish clearly between the products of these two agencies, and the problem of differentiating between them can be approached from two distinct directions. Thus, in dealing with the origin of a given group of implements, we may bring to bear upon the problem our knowledge as to the manner in which flint is fractured and fissured by natural forces, or we may seek for traces of humanity in the method exhibited in the flaking of the implement, the contours of its edges, the evidence of specific design, and the traces of the usage to which the tools have been put.

In approaching the problem from the standpoint of natural forces, we are faced with the fact that our knowledge of the character and the magnitude of the natural forces which have acted, or are acting, upon the flints in question is extremely limited.

On the southern shore of Achill Island, Co. Mayo, between the cathedral rocks of Menawn and the village of Keel, lies Keel strand, a flat grass-grown plain of blown sand, some few feet above high water mark. Rather nearer to the village of Keel than to the rocks of Menawn the sand is being gradually removed by the wind, leaving a low cliff three to four feet in height facing the sea, the high water mark when I was there in September, 1911, being some three to four hundred yards away from the cliff.

A few yards nearer the sea than the cliff, numerous fossil or semi-fossil bones were exposed, almost all, as far as I could tell, being of horse with a few of pig, together with a quantity of shells evidently forming a kitchen midden. A few pebbles amongst the shells showed signs of use as hammer stones. At about the same distance from the sea as the midden, and at a short distance from it, was a low mound of sand and pebbles about 27 feet in diameter, rising about 18 inches above the surrounding sand. In the centre was a boulder standing upon end, but too heavy for me to move, and there were indications that a ring of stones surrounded the mound, but the sand drift made it impossible to ascertain this positively.

The pygmy and small implements shown to-night from Cornwall were found on the landward slope of Trevose Head, near Padstow, on the north coast of the county. The sea end of this promontory rises to some 200 feet, and thence the ground inclines rapidly back to the mainland, the connecting neck being not more than half a mile wide. At the narrowest part the rain-water, constantly filtering through the adjacent peat, wastes down the hard bedrock of slate, comes out as a small spring, which, in the course of ages, has cut a channel of a hundred yards in length to the cliff edge. At the springhead stands a cairn of a massive block of white quartz, obviously of great age, but whether coeval with the prehistoric settlpment it would be impossible to say. This cairn or beacon would be seen from a long way over the adjacent bay, and might have served to guide seafarers of any age to the fresh-water supply. Here, amongst the faint traces of trenching and hut circles, the small implements, and chips made in their manufacture, all of snow-white patina, were lying about in great profusion.

During the last year or two I have obtained some 1262 flint implements of varying types and patinas from a small area of the parish of Cranwich in South-West Norfolk. The implements may with comparative ease be divided into three groups according to patina, white, blue, and black, the last-named including those having miscellaneous colourings that are neither blue nor white, or with no appreciable patina. According to these divisions I have 351 white, 268 blue, 604 black and 12 implements with totally different patinas on the two sides.

The white patinated implements are found on a rich loam on which water rests in wet weather. This is only from four to eight inches thick, and the subsoil is locally known as “cobbles chalk,” that is, chalk broken into small lumps by glacial action. These lumps are about the size of plums quite white, and in a foot or so pass into undisturbed chalk. The blue patinated implements are mainly found on a sandy area resting on chalk, and the black on a sand and gravel area with chalk as the subsoil, though a few hollows are filled with chalky boulder clay. On the sandy area the surface soil is somewhat deeper, averaging from nine inches to a foot.

In October last, I was visiting the gravel pits in this neighbourhood, and on reaching one in the parish of Wretton, about half a mile west of Stoke Ferry, one of the men mentioned some bones and an iron spearhead they had found some time previously. I asked to see them, and was taken to another part of the workings, where on a ledge near the surface of the ground was a small hole dug into the face of the pit. Projecting from the hole was a large bone, and stuck into the earth at the side, the spearhead. As they seemed to value their find very lightly, I gave the men a trifle and brought away the articles, asking them to keep any further finds for me.

Some six weeks after, I paid them another visit. Nothing further had been done at this particular spot; two of the men, however, volunteered to dig into the side and see if there was anything else. At the first blow of the pick another large bone was unearthed, a practically complete femur. Soon after this an iron knife blade came to light, then on the right side of the body an iron shield boss, and near the head a small iron knife. No other relics were found beyond a few pieces of bone, all with the exception of the two femurs in a very friable state. Three small pieces of the cranium were all that remained of that part. One arm appeared to have been extended above the head, as part of a humerus was lying upright on the remains of the skull. The spearhead must have been near the feet, as it was found first.