Boucher de Perthes, when, so recently as 1847, he entitled his volume devoted to the corresponding discoveries in the valley of the Somme, _Antiquités Celtiques et Antédiluviennes_. The antiquity of man, as now understood, was then unthought of; and the word “antediluvian” sufficed as a vague expression of remote indefinite antiquity for which pre-Celtic would then have been accepted as an equivalent. Mr. Frere speaks of the flint implements as “evidently weapons of war fabricated and used by a people who had not the use of metals.” He further adds: “The manner in which they lie would lead to the persuasion that it was a place of their manufacture, and not of their accidental deposit; and the numbers of them 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.”[16] When, in December 1886, Mr. J. Allan Brown communicated to the same Society an analogous discovery near Ealing, Middlesex, English archæologists had become so familiar with the idea of the antiquity of palæolithic man, and the arts of his epoch, that the existence of pre-Celtic races in Britain was accepted as a mere truism. It was not, therefore, any matter of surprise to be told of the discovery of a palæolithic workshop floor of the Drift period, near Ealing. It lay about a hundred feet above the present bed of the Thames; and here, six feet below the surface, on an ancient sloping bank of the river, an area of about forty feet square disclosed nearly six hundred unabraded worked flints, including neatly finished spear heads from five to six inches in length. Alongside of these lay roughly wrought axes, chipped on one or both sides to a cutting edge, and some of them unfinished. There were also flint flakes, some with serrated edges, and well-finished knives, borers, drills, chisels, etc. Waste flakes and chippings, as well as cores, or partially worked blocks of flint, were also observed in sufficient numbers to leave no doubt that here, in the place of their manufacture, lay buried beneath the accumulations of unnumbered centuries industrial products of the skilled artizans of the British Islands contemporary with the long-extinct quaternary fauna.[17]