Page:The Ancient Stone Implements (1897).djvu/618

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RIVER-DRIFT IMPLEMENTS.
[CHAP. XXIII.

of the Wey towards Wracklesham, pits which, have furnished several hundreds of palæolithic implements of various forms and sizes. The oval and ovate seem to predominate, hut there have been found not a few fine pointed implements. Associated with the more sharply preserved specimens, are many of dark ochreous colour, with their angles much abraded, which in all probability have been brought down by the old river from beds higher up its valley. Remains of mammoth occur occasionally in the gravels. Some specimens of the implements are preserved in the Charterhouse School Museum. Mr. Lasham informs me of an implement having been found in gravel at Peperharow, of a part of one near Farley Heath, and of one found at Frimley,[1] in the valley of the Blackwater.

The discoveries of palæolithic implements in the valley of the Colne near its junction with the Thames, have already been recorded. In the valley of the Misbourne, an affluent of the Colne, an implement was found in 1891 in digging the foundations of the bridge over the Metropolitan Extension Railway, just north of Great Missenden. It is of a thick ovate form, made of grey flint, rather narrower than Pl. II., No. 18, and with small flat surfaces of the original crust of the flint left about the middle of each side. The specimen is in my own collection.

In the valley of the Gade, in Hertfordshire, a few have been found by myself. The first of these was lying on the surface of a ploughed field near Bedmond,[2] in the parish of Abbot's Langley, at a spot which, though probably 160 feet above the level of the nearest part of the stream, is towards the bottom of one of the lateral valleys leading into the main valley of the Gade, between Boxmoor and Watford. The implement, which has unfortunately lost its point, is remarkably similar in form and size to that from Gray's Inn Lane, Fig. 451. The flint of which it is made has become nearly white and porcellanous on both faces, though more so on one than on the other. In places it has been so much altered in structure that it can be cut with a knife. I have noticed this feature in flints which have lain long in pervious red brick-earth, and this leads me to suppose that the implement may have been derived from some beds of that character at the spot where it was found, though on this point I have no direct

  1. Proc. Geol. Assoc., vol. xiii. p. 80.
  2. Arch., vol. lxxix. p. 73. Prestwich, Quar. Journ. Geol. Soc., vol. xvii. p. 368. Lubbock, "Preh. Times," 4th ed., p. 355.