12
THE ESSEX NATURALIST.
It lay in the middle of the sands of the Weybourne Crag below the
bed of rolled clay pebbles that constitutes the base of the Forest
Bed, with fossil marine shells all round it, over and under it,
and within its crevices. It was evident that the carcase of the
animal to which it belonged had drifted out to the Crag sea.
The jaw bone fell to pieces into the prismatic and tabular forms
that are so familiar from the bone-bed of the Crag, and was of
similarly mineralized character. In the presence of a scouring
current where sedimentation was arrested, such bones would
become broken-up, and accumulate as a rolled bone-bed on the
sea floor.
This view of the origin of the sub-Crag bone-bed is supported
by the fact that the phosphatization is a sub-marine product.
Moreover, it is in harmony with the rise in the Crag sea floor
from Sudbury at about 140 feet O.D. to Stoke-by-Clare at 270,
where the Crag is 40 feet thick, thus bringing the Crag sea level
to over 300 O.D. As I see it, the associations of the Suffolk
bone-bed fall naturally into the above epoch of submergence;
from Walton-on-Naze to Cromer and across to Stoke-by-Clare
from the Coralline to the Weybourne Crags, and at all the varying
depths of the Crag Sea, there is no visible break in the marine
continuity from the bone-bed and stone-bed to the overlying
sediments ; in a word, the Crags possess a normal basement-bed.
The most remarkable phenomenon of this ancient sea floor
is the vast quantity of flaking that is distributed over it, and the
problem of its origin (not some of it only, but all of it) must be
faced.
Is it Eolithic or Natural, and if the latter, by what process
could it have arisen?
A peculiarly authoritative presentation of the case for the
Eoliths may be found in the "Handbook" for the Prehistoric
Congress held in London in 1932. It is there argued with much
reason that the Crag Eoliths are contemporary with the basement-
bed and cannot have been derived from a distance, or from an
earlier deposit. On broad lines I agree (that is, that they belong
to the Crag sea floor), provided some drifting about, such as one
sees in the occasional duplication of the Bone-bed, is not excluded.
But I cannot follow the further conclusion that the bone-bed was
occupied by Tertiary man—unless he was of the Mermaid race!