Let me congratulate you on the formation of this Society. It is high time that here in England we should begin to draw together, in one district at any rate, those who are interesting themselves in the absorbing but difficult study of the early ages of the human race before the dawn of history.

There can be no question but that of late years our country has dropped behind some of its neighbours in the attention paid to the subject, and it is time that we began to wake up. Forty years ago we were in the forefront. Evans was producing his immortal work on the “Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain.” Christy, in collaboration with his great French confrere Lartet, was carrying out the investigations in the cave deposits of Dordogne which weie the principal foundation for the generalisations of Gabriel de Mortillet, that, with many additions due to French workers, hold their own to-day. Lartet and Christy's work was summed up in the important volume of “Reliquiae Aquitanicae,” published in 1875. Pengelley was carrying on his masterly investigation of the deposits in Kent's Cavern at Torquay; whilst Boyd Dawkins was, with others, digging in Hie caves of Derbyshire and Yorkshire, and proving the existence thus far North of the cave-men of Palaeolithic age, hitherto associated chiefly with the Dordogne district.

On the 3rd of October, 1909, I found on a stone heap in Messrs. Bolton and Laughlin's brickfield near Ipswich a large flint implement fashioned from a cylindrical nodule and flaked to a cutting edge at one end. This implement, which is obviously very massive, weight 8¾lbs., is deeply patinated on its worked surfaces a yellowish-brown colour, and has a very hard ferruginous deposit attached to portions of its crust.

Following on this discovery I commenced, searching for others, and eventually found them lying on the London Clay under a seam of decalcified crag, and associated with many bones and phosphatic nodules such as are met with at other ordinary bases of the Red Crag. This decalcified crag occurs in two basin-shaped hollows, one 56 yards wide and the other 45 yards, in the London Clay. The general arrangement of the beds (Plate I.) in the hollows is as follows:—

1. Top sand and gravel, in places up to 9 feet in thickness.

2. Middle Glacial Sands, with sarsen stones, maximum thickness 12 feet to 15 feet.

3. Decalcified crag, with casts of shells up to 3 feet. This is very hard in the eastern hollow, and rests upon an uneven floor of London Clay, containing pockets filled with pebbles, and boulders of flint and micaceous sandstone.

The object of this paper is to call attention to certain facts in connection with flint implements, both Palæolithic and Neolithic, which have been hitherto overlooked, and to attempt to find an explanation for them. This explanation must inevitably run counter to the generally received opinions of geologists as to the sequence of events in the Pleistocene period, and also to a large extent to the views hitherto held by prehistoric archælogists regarding the Neolithic, and in a less degree the Palæolithic ages of man. I therefore approach the task, not indeed with misgiving, but with a deep sense of the gravity of the issues involved, and I would ask both geologists and prehistoric archæologists to do me the honour of giving their very careful attention to the matters I am bringing forward; to put for the moment on one side any preconceived views on the subject, and to suspend judgment until they have had the opportunity of examining for themselves the data upon which my conclusions are founded. These conclusions are the result of many years of work and observation. Starting from the orthodox standpoint and without any bias whatever against the generally received opinions as to the ice age of the Northern hemisphere, I have been, drawn on wholly by the observation of facts to my present position.

In the summer of 1904 I received some letters from the late Mr. Auberon Herbert, together with some small neolithic worked flints from Egypt and other places, which he considered to represent human faces and certain animals. There was no doubt that in some of these, even without a stretch of the imagination, likenesses could be traced to specified living forms, but owing to the peculiar shapes into which the sharp edge of a flint flake will get naturally broken, I wrote to Mr. Herbert that I was not convinced that these specimens were prehistoric Cameos as he maintained they were. During the same summer I came across a mass of Thames ballast which had been brought by lighters from near Gravesend and deposited at Southend to construct an Esplanade. On searching these I found, besides a very fine scraper and many flakes, a specimen which struck me as being so animistic in form that, though purely a natural object (as I then thought it was) I took it home, with the idea of sending it to the remarkable collection of flint nodules and ventriculites (without human work) which Mr. McKenny Hughes shows at the Geological Museum at Cambridge.