Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 6 (1902).djvu/387

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PREHISTORIC MAN IN BURMA.
327

and, in the majority of cases, can be with fair certainty grouped into families belonging each to a separate original store, thus proving that they are chips belonging to flints which were broken up at the spot where they are now found undisturbed? If the chips have no connection with the Pliocene stratum, the difficulty occasioned by their numbers and fitting together is got over, and there is no necessity to do violence to one's feelings by supposing that in some way or other the original flints must have got chipped up spontaneously.

On the first day we went from Thittabwe to Minlin Hill, round the northern and eastern sides of which the ferruginous conglomerate crops out, and began by examining the bed there, as it is clear that, if chipped flints are a feature of this bed, they may be found scattered throughout it, and not only at one definite spot. Finding nothing, we searched Taung-ni-gale (the small red hill), to the east of Minlin, where the conglomerate outcrops on the surface, and where Dr. Noetling had previously found some poor specimens; but we were again unsuccessful. We then proceeded in a northerly direction, towards No. 49, crossed the Ye-dwin-aing Yo (a "Yo" is described in Stevenson's Dictionary as a blind watercourse), and kept on till we calculated we were somewhere near No. 49. As it subsequently turned out, we were still a little to the south of it, when we stopped and examined the conglomerate (which here runs in a general north and south direction some fifty feet below the edge of a ravine), and picked up a few rolled fragments of bone, and (in a small yo) a few specimens of Batissa crawfurdi, which had apparently rolled down the steep bank. As the day's work, we had examined the conglomerate carefully from Minlin Hill almost up to No. 49.

On the second day we crossed the oil-field from west to east by the cart-track that leads by the gas-well, and continued on till we came to where the conglomerate crosses the road at right angles on the east side, and spent the day searching the conglomerate both north and south of this place, but chiefly to the north, where it looked more promising. It continues to run here some way below the edge of a ravine, and can be searched without much difficulty. All this part was obviously in the vicinity of No. 49, and, so long as we stuck to the conglomerate, it did not seem to matter whether we were on the identical