Note 49 — Chapter II

Sir Henry Howorth has written a series of articles (Geol. Mag., 1892, pp. 250-8, 396-405; Nat. Science, xii, 1898, pp. 261-70), in which he claims to have proved that ‘in no instance, so far as we know, does the drift actually underlie any land surface containing the remains of the mammoth and of its contemporaries.’ Translated into the language of geologists to whom the glacial period is not a nightmare, this is tantamount to an assertion that the mammoth was neither postglacial, nor interglacial, nor glacial, but preglacial. Mr. A. J. Jukes-Browne (Geol. Mag., 1892, p. 575) replies that ‘gravels containing mammoth remains occur in many other valleys [besides that of the Great Ouse], which are generally considered to have been eroded out of a widespread mantle of Glacial Drift’, and that ‘this conclusion is not shaken by anything which Sir H. Howorth has written’; while Sir John Evans (Anc. Stone Implements, 1879, p. 701) remarks that ‘in some cases, as at Fisherton, the worked flints have been found below the remains of mammoth’. Since the gravel at Hoxne, in which bones of the mammoth and of extinct animals contemporary with the mammoth were found (Sir J. Evans, Anc. Stone Implements, 1897, pp. 573-5; C. Reid, Origin of the Brit. Flora, p. 77; Guide to the Ant. of the Stone Age [Brit. Museum], p. 20), was shown by the committee who excavated it (Report of ... the Brit. Association, 1896, pp. 400-11) to be later than the latest glaciation of the district, Sir Henry naturally discredited their report; and he did so by declaring (Nat. Science, xii, 1898, p 266) that the members of the committee were ‘already committed ... to the view that the implement-bearing deposit at Hoxne was newer than the Drift. This,’ he continued, ‘was not very promising.... It was, in fact, indecent.’