So early as the first year of the nineteenth century, a remarkable paper was communicated to the Society of Antiquaries by Mr. John Frere, in which he gave a clear description of the discovery at Hoxne, near Diss, in Suffolk, of flint tools of the type since found at Amiens, adding at the same time good geological reasons for presuming that their antiquity was very great, or, as he expressed it, beyond that of the present world, meaning the actual state of the physical geography of that region. "The flints," he said, "were evidently weapons of war, fabricated and used by a people who had not the use of metals. They lay in great numbers at the depth of about 12 feet in a stratified soil which was dug into for the purpose of raising clay for bricks. Under a foot and a half of vegetable earth was clay 7 1/2 feet thick, and beneath this one foot of sand with shells, and under this 2 feet of gravel, in which the shaped flints were found generally at the rate of 5 or 6 in a square yard. In the sandy beds with shells were found the jawbone and teeth of an enormous unknown animal. The manner in which the flint weapons lay would lead to the persuasion that it was a place of their manufacture, and not of their accidental deposit. Their numbers were so great that the man who carried on the brick-work told me that before he was aware of their being objects of curiosity, he had emptied baskets full of them into the ruts of the adjoining road." Mr. Frere then goes on to explain that the strata in which the flints occur are disposed horizontally, and do not lie at the foot of any higher ground, so that portions of them must have been removed when the adjoining valley was hollowed out. If the author had not mistaken the freshwater shells associated with the tools for marine species, there would have been nothing to correct in his account of the geology of the district, for he distinctly perceived that the strata in which the implements were embedded had, since that time, undergone very extensive denudation.* (* Frere, "Archaeologia" volume 13 1800 page 206.) Specimens of the flint spear-heads, sent to London by Mr. Frere, are still preserved in the British Museum, and others are in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries. [Illustration: Figure 24. Position of Flint Weapons] (FIGURE 24. SECTION SHOWING THE POSITION OF THE FLINT WEAPONS AT HOXNE, NEAR DISS, SUFFOLK. See Prestwich "Philosophical Transactions" Plate 11 1860.) 1. Gravel of Gold Brook, a tributary of the Waveney. 2. Higher-level gravel overlying the freshwater deposit. 3 and 4. Sand and gravel, with freshwater shells, and flint implements, and bones of mammalia. 5. Peaty and clayey beds, with same fossils. 6. Boulder clay or glacial drift. 7. Sand and gravel below boulder clay. 8. Chalk with flints.)