Primaeval Man in the Valley of the Lea. 107
on the London-clay. The primaeval Palaeolithic men lived in
large numbers on this great bank, and when they looked east-
wards towards Stratford they did not glance over a grassy flat as
we do now, but over a shallow and possibly wide river with a
surface 40 or 50 feet higher than at present. On the opposite,
or Essex side, owing to the rains of many centuries, the banks
or terraces are not so well defined as on the Middlesex side, but
still the positions are really there; the gravel, the implements,
the fossil bones, and the shells of fresh-water molluscs are pre-
cisely the same on one side of the river as the other. If a
journey is made by railway from Hackney Downs Station to
Cheshunt, the old Palaeolithic banks can be seen in several
places, in some instances as much as four miles apart from
east to west across the Lea. In many places the old banks
are obliterated; this obliteration has been probably caused
by the rainfall of many thousands of years, the rains gradually
washing away the softer materials of the banks, and leaving
the harder and more enduring positions intact.2
It is almost unnecessary to mention the fact, pointed out
in so many geological books, that in the remote Paleolithic
times now under consideration England was probably part of
the Continent of Europe; that the Lea was a wide but
shallow river, sometimes more like a torrent than a quiet
stream, and constantly changing its bed. The Lea, then as
now, was an affluent of the Thames, the latter at that time
being a large and rapidly-flowing tributary of the Rhine which
last emptied itself into the North Sea. The sea of course did
not flow between Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, and what
is now known as Britain then extended much further south-
wards, where the English Channel now is, westwards towards
2 "When Prof. Hughes read his paper on the "Antiquity of Man" before
the Victoria Institute, one speaker, a Fellow of the Geological Society,
said the embankments or terraces of the Somme were not continuous,
and so could not have kept the river in. Prof. Hughes forgot to reply to
this objection, but the explanation is of course perfectly easy when sub-
sequent denudation is admitted. This alteration of the surface is proved
by the present condition of various works of known age—for instance, the
Roman roads in Cambridgeshire are distinct when they cross the hard
chalky soil, but are quite obliterated in clayey positions.