AN OCEAN WAIF.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), 3 August 1881, Page 4

AN OCEAN WAIF.

Walking one morning la9t winter—a day or so after the terrible Tuesday—-on tho parade at Fastings, I happened to notice a curiously-shaped flint among the shingle just thrown up by the great storns. The ■waves had beaten right over the sea-wall, and scattered wrack and pebbles along the whole roadway. I stooped down and picked up the odd-looking fragment j to my surprise, I found it was a palreolithic 'implement, a rudely-chipped flint knife of the older stone age, the relic of a race compared with whom even the builders of Wansdyke here were men of yesterday. This rude flake was fashioned by the naked black-fellows who hunted the rhinoceros and the mommoth in the English valleys before ever the great ice age itself had Spread its glaciers over the length and breadth of the land, a : couple of hundred thousand years since. Its outer surface was dulled and whitened by age, as is always the ease with these primeval flint weapons ; but its edge was still sharp and keen. though crusted in places with hard film of mineral deposit, aud also blunted here and there by use in cutting clubs and reindeer bones for its savage possessor. But there were no traces of rolling, as in watervjorn pebbles; the knife was freshly disinterred. It was clear that the storm had just unearthed it from beneath the submerged forest which belts all the coast from Beachy Head to Dungeness. For the forest. is a post-glacial deposit; and it once formed part of this great connecting land, now buried beneath the Atlantic, the English Channel, and the German Ocean. The trees •which compose it still stand as upright atumps, firmly bedded in alayer of tenacious clay ; and strewn beneath them lie prostrate boles, in the very places where the wind threw them down some fifty or sixty thousand years ago. In the public garden at Hastings, one of these huge balks, dug up on the St. Leonard's beach, has been fixed as a curiosi'y ; and though its outer layer is charred and blackened hy the water, the inner wood is still as sound and firm as on the day it fell. For we have to deal here with a time which is marvellously ancient indeed when measured by our ordinary human and historical chronology, but which 13 quite modern when judged by the vast t.imPTnVe of eosmicftland geological Cjoes. —Cornhill Magazine.