animal population of our continent has passed through all the phases of the quaternary period.

"On a resumé as regards the terrestrial fauna, we arrive at the following conclusions:

"1. Some genera of mammals are no longer found in Europe, (Elephant, rhinoceros, hyæna, etc).

"2. Certain species are entirely extinct. (Elephas primigenius, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, Ursus spelaus, etc.)

"3. Other species have continued to live in their respective regions, or in neighbouring countries. (Ursus Arctos, Bos Urus, Cervus Tarandus, etc.)

"Have the geological and climatic causes which produced these changes equally modified the flora which existed at the period when the great mammals became extinct? In other words, were the forests frequented by the men who fashioned the flints in France, England, etc., composed of the same species of trees which constitute the actual vegetation?

"The examination of the fossil impressions collected by Marquis Strozzi in the travertines of Tuscany prove that considerable modifications have been produced in vegetation. We may say that the

changes in the flora and the fauna are parallel.

"1. Certain genera of plants which flourished in Europe at the period of the huge mammals are no longer indigenous in this part of the world. Such are the genera Thuja, Liquidambar, and Juglans.

"2. Some species are entirely extinct (Thuja saviana, Juglans paviafolia Gaud.)

"3. Others exist still in Europe, near the beds where they have been found.

"Struck by this parallelism, I have long suspected that the modifications in the fauna and flora were effected at the same epoch.

"Very recently Mr. Penzi, of Rome, found in the travertines of Tivoli and Monticelli human teeth associated with the remains of the hyæna and other mammals. He considers this bed as belonging to the second pleistocene period, in the rocks of which near Rome large pachydermata have been found.

"In conclusion, the deposits of the travertines and tufas, characterized by their containing the bones of the large mammals contemporary with man, contain also a vegetation somewhat differing from that of our present forests.

"Some genera which then inhabited Europe are no longer met with, and these are chiefly American types, or those of the Atlantic islands."

VOL. I.-NO. I.

Н

"Some genera have completely disappeared from the surface of the globe, whilst the major part have not ceased to inhabit the same stations, or have migrated to neighbouring countries. The fossil animals which contain some leaves, prove that the deposits are either anterior or contemporaneous with the glacial period.

"I arrive thus as regards the vegetable world at the same conclusions as Lartet with respect to the animal world.

"The major portion of the vegetable population of our continent has traversed all the phases of the quaternary period, and that man could thus have existed as well as the vegetable world of our continent." M. Gosse presented to the Anthropological Society of Paris seventyone worked flints of various shapes. First a magnificent hatchet resembling those found by M. Boucher de Perthes, at Abbeville, but much larger, being not less than nineteen centimetres in length. To obviate any objection as to the nature and age of the bed, M. Gosse requested M. Hébert, Professor of Geology, to accompany him in his explorations of the quarry of the Rue de Grenelle. Professor Hébert states, positively, that the hatchet was extracted from the bed called the inferior diluvium, the thickness of which is about four feet and a half, situated about fifteen feet beneath the surface of the soil. It is noteworthy that scarcely any flints were found in the superior bed. In the same stratum were found a large number fossil bones, according to M. Lartet, the remains of the Elephas primigenius, Bos primigenius, the fossil horse, and a large carnivorous animal resembling the cavern felis. There were also extracted about seventy knives, wedges, arrowheads, etc. Some of the hatchets were only partially worked. The natural shapes of the flints appear to have been taken advantage of. There are at present about twelve gravel pits in Paris and its environs where flint implements are found.

Mr. Prestwich, in writing to M. Boucher de Perthes, says :*“ In writing to you a few days since, I forgot to state the opinion I have formed as regards the bed in which the flint hatchets are found.

"With regard to the workmanship of those you have shown to me, and which I have myself procured at Abbeville and Amiens, I have not the least doubt of their being worked by man.

"After having attentively examined the beds of Moulin Quignon,|| St. Gilles, Abbeville, Saint Acheul, and Amiens, I have the conviction that the opinion you advanced in 1847 in your work on Celtic and antediluvian antiquities, that these hatchets are situated in undisturbed ground associated with the bones of the large mammalia, is just and

* May 14th, 1859.

well founded. With regard to the bed at Menchecourt, the fact appears to me not so certain; yet I can detect no error.

"Permit me to observe that before my voyage I entertained the strongest doubts on the subject of the beds, and I am very happy to have convinced myself by searching for the truth of so important a fact."

In another letter to M. Boucher, dated June 8th, 1859, Mr. Prestwich writes:-"Though I returned fully convinced that the flint hatchets were truly from the diluvium, still I desired to find one myself, and that in the presence of other members of the Geological Society of London. I accordingly left ten days ago, accompanied by my friends, Messrs. Godwin-Austen, J. W. Flower, and R. W. Mylne. We went to work early the following morning, and after having closely examined the quarry at St. Acheul, Mr. Flower discovered and detached with his own hands, at a depth of twenty feet, a beautiful hatchet well worked, of the length of about twenty-five centimeters. It was found in an ochreous seam, beneath the white gravel, whence I extracted another hatchet. Above the gravel ways a layer of sand with fresh water and land shells, then brown clay, gravel, and brick-earth. All was in the best order and undisturbed. It was beyond a doubt virgin soil. This discovery removed all doubts from the minds of my friends; and I believe we are all agreed as to the truth of which you have been the first exponent, and which you have vindicated for the last ten years, and of which I am happy to have been a witness."

Mr. Prestwich gives the following description of the gravel-beds of St. Acheul, capping a low chalk hill, a mile south-east of the city of Amiens, about one hundred feet above the level of the Somme, and not commanded by any higher ground. The following is the succession of the beds in descending order.

1. Brown brick-earth (many old tombs and some coins), with irregular bed of flint-gravel. No organic remains. Average thickness, ten to fifteen feet.

2 a. Whitish marl and sand, with small chalk débris. Land and freshwater shells (all of recent species) are common, and mammalian bones and teeth are occasionally found. Average thickness, two to eight feet.

2 b. Coarse subangular flint gravel, white with irregular ochreous and ferruginous seams, with tertiary flint pebbles, and small sandstone blocks. Remains of shells, as above, in patches of sand. Teeth and bones of the elephant, and of a species of horse, ox, and deer, generally near base. This bed is further remarkable for containing worked flints. Average thickness, six to twelve feet.

Mr. Prestwich, in his paper read before the Royal Society, May

26th, 1859, abstaining from all theoretical speculation, confines himself simply to the corroboration of the facts :

1. That the flint implements are the work of man.

2. That they were found in undisturbed ground.

3. That they are associated with the remains of extinct mammalia. 4. That the period was a late geological one, and anterior to the surface assuming its present outline, so far as some of its minor features are concerned.

Lord Wrottesley writes:*" Another independent proof of the great age of the gravel on the banks of the Somme, is derived from the large deposit of peat, the oldest portion of which belongs to times far beyond those of tradition; yet distinguished geologists are of opinion the growth of all the vegetable matter, and even the original scooping out of the hollows, are events long posterior in date to the gravel with flint implements, nay, posterior even to the formation of the layers of loam with freshwater shells overlying the gravel."

Sir R. Murchison says: "Whilst the geological geographer who visits the banks of the Somme, and sees such an assemblage of relics beneath great accumulations formed by water (as I have recently witnessed myself), he is compelled to infer, when such a phenomenon was brought about, the waters, which have now diminished to an ordinary and small river, had risen in great inundations to the height of one hundred feet and more above the present stream, and swept over the slopes of the chalk in which the primeval inhabitants were fashioning their rude flint instruments, and when, as I would suggest, they escaped to the adjacent hills, and saving themselves from the sweeping flood, left no traces of their bones in the silt, sand, and gravel.”

...

Sir Charles Lyell says: "I am fully prepared to corroborate the conclusions which have been recently laid before the Royal Society by Mr. Prestwich, in regard to the age of the flint implements associated in undisturbed gravel, in the north of France, with the bones of elephants at Abbeville and Amiens. . . . I infer that a tribe of savages, to whom the use of iron was unknown, made a long sojourn in this region; and I am reminded of a large Indian mound, which I saw at St. Simon's island in Georgia-a mound ten acres in area, and having an average height of five feet, chiefly composed of cast away oyster shells, throughout which arrow heads, stone axes, and Indian pottery are dispersed. If the neighbouring river, the Alatamaha, or the sea

* Lord Wrottesley in his Address at the Oxford Meeting of the British Association, 1860.

+ Sir R. Murchison in his Address to the Geographical and Ethnological Section of the British Association at Oxford, 1860.

Sir Charles Lyell's Address at the British Association, at Aberdeen, 1859.

which is at hand, should invade, sweep away, and stratify the contents of this mound, it might produce a very analogous accumulation of human implements, unmixed, perhaps, with human bones. Lastly, the disappearance of the elephant, rhinoceros, and other genera of quadrupeds, implies in like manner a vast lapse of ages, separating the era in which the fossil implements were framed, and that of the invasion of Gaul by the Romans."

Assuming, now, that the worked flint theory is established by such strong evidence, as to amount to demonstration, there arise two very interesting questions: first, if possible, to determine the period in which these implements were fashioned, and the race of men who fabricated them.

It is not easy to give anything like a satisfactory answer to these queries, for in our present state of knowledge we possess no data to infer from. This much seems certain, that the race who worked the drift flints must have lived at a very remote time, cycles of ages anterior to the so-called Celtic period. Sir Charles Lyell* observes on this point. "All the evidence now before us on these flint implements, and on the circumstances under which they were found, would indicate that the people who made them must have occupied this site before the Straits of Dover were excavated."

It remains for geologists approximatively to determine the period when that event occurred.

M. George Pouchet † visited Saint Acheul, August 25, 1859. The workmen promised to call him as soon as they could find a langue de chat," or cat's tongue, the name given by the miners to the flint hatchets. A few hours had scarcely elapsed when M. Pouchet was called for, and shown one; he, however, immediately perceived that it was a deception, and that the flint had been fraudulently introduced into an artificial cavity. After five days he was called again. This time he saw a hatchet imbedded in the diluvium under such conditions that a mystification was out of the question. After removing the flint from the diluvium he found that it had been worked, and must have been worked at a period anterior to the formation of the bed above it. Besides the stone hatchet which M. Pouchet had extracted himself, he saw many which had been dug out before his arrival. Some of these were spurious, others were perfectly genuine. Pouchet indicates an important character to distinguish the latter. In the course of centuries infiltrations reached the diluvium, depositing a crust of carbonate of lime, of about one millimetre in thickness,

Opening Address, Aberdeen, 1859.

+ Bulletin de la Société de la Anthropologie, November 3rd, 1859, p. 44.