Proceeding along the southern coast, the next discoveries that have to be recorded are those made to the west of Eastbourne by Mr. R. Hilton. At Bell's Field, Friston, he has found ovate implements, both ochreous and white and porcellanous, and he has given me a pointed implement from Crow Link Gap, East Dean. Although found on the surface and not in gravel or brick-earth, the implements present types which seem to justify their being regarded as of Palæolithic age.
Farther west, in the so-called Elephant bed at Brighton, a bed apparently of subaërial origin, and containing numerous mammalian remains of the Pleistocene period, Mr. Ernest Willett, in 1876, found a well-marked ovate implement, 512 inches long, of the type shown in Plate II., No. 11.
Fig. 464b.—Folkestone. 12
With these exceptions, if such they be, the valleys of the smaller rivers along the southern coast of England have as yet been barren of discoveries of implements in their gravels, until we come to the Itchen and the Test, which unite below Southampton, and now discharge into Southampton Water. As will be subsequently seen, there is good reason for believing that at the time when these implements were in use, a portion of the ground now covered by this estuary formed the bed of a river, itself a branch of a larger stream, only a small part of the course of which now remains, and that in a greatly altered condition, having been widened out into the Solent and Spithead.
The localities at which palæolithic implements have been found in the neighbourhood of the Itchen and Test are as yet mainly confined to the lower part of their course, namely, near the town of Southampton and along the shore of Southampton Water. The first discoveries in the district were made in 1863,[1] by Mr. James Brown, of Salisbury, who found several implements in the neighbourhood of- ↑ "Flint Chips," p. 45.
