large and rude, but many appear to have had their edges chipped by use. Some have been wrought into the scraper form. Cores or blocks of flint from which flakes have been struck have also been found.
Fig. 454.—Ealing Dean. 12
In May, 1871, an implement, 8 inches long, and of rather less tapering form than that from Ealing, Fig. 454, was found at Acton, beneath 13 feet of sand and gravel, at a spot where the surface is 70 feet above high-water mark. General Pitt Rivers has also seven or eight flakes of flint, one of them 512 inches long and 1 inch wide, which were found together, beneath 9 feet of brick-earth and gravel, in excavating for the foundations of a house at Acton. Their edges are sharp and unworn, so that they must have been deposited where they were found, prior to the accumulation of the 9 feet of drifted beds above them. They lay in a bed of ochreous sandy clay, about 1 foot in thickness, which reposed immediately on the blue London Clay.
In Acton village, the beds of Drift which constitute the first patch of gravel occurring at so high a level as we go westward from London, and which form a sort of terrace overlooking the broad valley of the Thames, attain a thickness of 18 feet, and consist of layers of sub-angular gravel, mixed with yellow and white sand, very irregularly stratified. The gravel consists principally of flints and Tertiary pebbles, with some of quartz and quartzite. A few mammalian remains, including a tooth of Elephas primigenius, have been found in these beds, and south of Ealing Park[1] land and freshwater shells. At- ↑ J. A. Brown, "Palæolithic Man in N.W. Middlesex," p. 113.
