Abstract
MR. WORTHINGTON G. SMITH's letter in NATURE of December 1 (p. 105), is so misleading that I hope I may be allowed to reply to it. As is usual with highly prejudiced observers, he has attempted to prove too much for his case, as he might have seen had he taken the trouble to refer to my papers. The scraper which he mentions was submitted to Dr. John Evans for his opinion, and his conclusion as given in my paper in the Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, vol. ix. p. 17, is as follows. The scraper “is not of a river-drift form, so far as at present known, but is precisely like many from the French caves of the reindeer periods, such, for instance, as La Madelaine.” Mr. Worthington Smith's contention therefore that it agrees exactly with “the Neolithic scrapers of Icklingham and Mildenhall” can only prove that there is no chronological value in the classification of such implements. I must explain, however, that we have based no argument on the scraper referred to, since it was found, before the explorations were properly commenced, in an open part of the cavern, and, as stated by me in the paper referred to, “it would be improper to dogmatize on this evidence.” I may say at once that I entirely demur to any classification based on the form of the implements rather than on the fauna associated with them, and I see no reason whatever to suppose that the worn, roughly-trimmed implements usually found in river gravels are older than the better-preserved flakes and trimmed implements found in caverns, which would be used for a different purpose from the rougher ones. The implements discovered subsequently belong to the so-called oldest types found in caverns, and were associated with Mammalian remains, equally characteristic of the oldest river gravels as of the caverns. Mr. Smith's statements in regard to the drift “in front of the Denbighshire caves” are of so extraordinary a character that I am tempted to ask him, before I criticize those statements, whether he ever visited the Flynnon Beuno Caves during the course of the explorations, whether he ever saw the section of the drift exposed at the Cae Gwyn Cave, and what evidence he can bring forward to support his statements that the drift “is not in its original position, but distinctly and obviously relaid,” and that he doubts “whether before it was relaid it was a true Glacial gravel at all?” I think the members of the British Association Committee, who have carefully conducted the explorations, and have the strongest evidence in support of their conclusion that the caverns, which are now about 400 feet above sea-level, were occupied by man and the animals before the marine drift and boulder-clay covered them over, have a right to ask for the data upon which such statements as those above referred to are based. These relate to facts, and must be dealt with in a different manner from those statements which are made clearly from a bias against the idea of Glacial and pre-Glacial man. Mr. Smith says that he has not been able to read up the literature of the subject, therefore he is probably unaware of the fact that Prof. Prestwich has recently (Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. for August last) stated that he has arrived at the conclusion that the high-level gravels, with implements, in the valleys of the Somme, Seine, Thames, and Avon date back to Glacidl or pre Glacial times; and that “the great masses of gravel in the neighbourhood of Mildenhall and Lakenheath, also containing flint implements, are certainly not of fluviatile origin; and that they seem to him “to be Part of the phenomena connected with the passage of the great ice-sheet over the eastern counties, and in that sense pre-Glacial.”
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HICKS, H. The Ffynnon Beuno and Cae Gwyn Caves. Nature 37, 129 (1887). https://doi.org/10.1038/037129a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/037129a0
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