OBJECTS FOUND IN THE PEAT. 377 



bourhood of Abbeville. He found considerable platforms of 

 wood, with large quantities of bones, stone implements, and 

 handles closely resembling those which come from the Swiss 

 lake villages. 



These weapons cannot for an instant be confounded with 

 the ruder ones from the drift-gravel. They are ground to a 

 smooth surface and a cutting edge, while those of the more 

 ancient types are merely chipped, not one of the many hun^ 

 dreds already found having shown the slightest trace of grind- 

 ing. Yet though the former belong to the Stone Age, to a 

 time so remote that the use of metal was apparently still 

 unknown in Western Europe, they are separated from the 

 earlier weapons of the upper-level drift by the whole period 

 necessary for the excavation of the Somme Valley, to a depth 

 of more than one hundred feet. 



If, therefore, we get no definite date for the arrival of man 

 in these countries, we can at least form a vivid idea of his 

 antiquity. He must have seen the Somme running at a height 

 of about a hundred feet above its present level. It is, indeed, 

 probable that he dates back in Northern France almost, if 

 not quite, as far as the rivers themselves. The fauna of the 

 country was unlike what it is now. Along the banks of the 

 rivers ranged a savage race of hunters and fishermen, and in 

 the forests wandered the mammoth, the two-horned woolly 

 rhinoceros, a species of lion, the musk ox, the reindeer, and 

 the urus. 



Yet the geography of France cannot have been very dif- 

 ferent from what it is at present. The present rivers ran in 

 their present directions, and the sea even then lay between 

 the Somme and the Adur, though the channel was not so wide 

 as it is now. 



Gradually the river deepened its valley ; ineffective, or even 

 perhaps constructive, in autumn and winter, the melting of 

 the snows turned it every spring into a roaring torrent. These 



