The Clay with Flints

Extract

I have the pleasure to submit for your information some conclusions which I have arrived at after two years' work among the flints of Hampshire, in a district contained between the Meon, West Sussex, and the south of the Isle of Wight. The point I wish to urge is that in very great probability the earliest pages of the History of the Stone Age will be found written, not in pits of transported gravel but at the fountain head and parent source of these gravels—the Clay with Flints of the chalk downs. That has been my hypothesis, and as I went along I found things fitting into it. I feel convinced that Professor Prestwich had some such idea when he recommended Mr. Benjamin Harrison to devote his attention to the flints of the North Downs at their highest points.

I would ask you to undertake a flight of imagination and to place yourselves in some modern aerial contrivance a few hundred feet above Alton in Hampshire, and to survey the horizon north, south and west. You will find below you the western extremity of the Wealden Pericline in the form of a truncated cone fading away to the horizon of Tertiaries which once wrapped round and spread over it, but which now have shrunk away to form the London and Hampshire Basins north and south of the Pericline. What was once a deposit of Reading Beds became in Eo., Mio, Plio. and Pleistocene time a smear of Remanié over the entire surface, before the excavation of the chalk valleys, a residue which we call Clay with Flints, and which is known in France as the Argile à Silex.