Animistic Forms in Certain Flints, Showing Human Work

Abstract

In the summer of 1904 I received some letters from the late Mr. Auberon Herbert, together with some small neolithic worked flints from Egypt and other places, which he considered to represent human faces and certain animals. There was no doubt that in some of these, even without a stretch of the imagination, likenesses could be traced to specified living forms, but owing to the peculiar shapes into which the sharp edge of a flint flake will get naturally broken, I wrote to Mr. Herbert that I was not convinced that these specimens were prehistoric Cameos as he maintained they were. During the same summer I came across a mass of Thames ballast which had been brought by lighters from near Gravesend and deposited at Southend to construct an Esplanade. On searching these I found, besides a very fine scraper and many flakes, a specimen which struck me as being so animistic in form that, though purely a natural object (as I then thought it was) I took it home, with the idea of sending it to the remarkable collection of flint nodules and ventriculites (without human work) which Mr. McKenny Hughes shows at the Geological Museum at Cambridge.