68 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



secondly as to then- unearthing and exposure to our observation. And 

 how rapidly one such discovery follows another may be partly inferred 

 from the fact that some years since a magazine ' was founded in Paris, 

 devoted to this special topic; many courses of lectures upon it were 

 delivered in the various cities of Europe; and for some years inter- 

 national congresses have been annually held, and societies and pe- 

 riodicals established, for the discussion of it and cognate subjects. 

 The literature of the subject is already voluminous. 



Let us revert to M. Boucher de Perthes's discoveries in the drift 

 of the Somme Valley. Begun in 1841, they were described by him in 

 a work published in 1847 a work then too little appreciated. But 

 when, in 1858, and in the same locality, he discovered a human skull 

 and various stone implements, in intimate association with remains of 

 the various animals of that period, the attention of the French Acade- 

 my was aroused, and the study of historical geology received a new 

 impetus. Some, indeed, see in the discovery of De Perthes only a 

 cheat, or at best a mistake, and doubt the antiquity of this skull and 

 its contemporaneousness with the animals found with it. The entire 

 collection is proved to be of the same age, however, by the whole 

 manner of the intermingling of human skulls, flint knives of unmis- 

 takable human workmanship, and animal remains ; and the genuine- 

 ness of De Perthes's discoveries and the validity of the inferences 

 drawn from them are confirmed by many similar ones made since 

 then in localities widely separated, both from that in which he worked 

 and from each other. 



What we said of the preservation of animal remains we repeat as 

 applicable, in an even higher degree, to that of human remains, in de- 

 bris so found; it is possible only as the result of a conjunction of 

 favoring circumstances that must be comparatively very rare. And yet 

 many such instances are on record. As early as 1825, Ami Boul, from 

 the loess of the Lahr region in the Breisgau, discovered a human 

 skeleton, and two years afterward a human skull, 2 with bones of the 

 mammoth and other diluvial animals, from the loess at Eguisheim, 

 near Colmar. The study of the deposit in which the latter of these two 

 discoveries was made, with the relative positions of the remains them- 

 selves, and the chemical analyses of them by Dr. Scheurer-Kestner, of 

 Thann, leave no room for doubt that the man and the animals were 

 synchronous, both in life and in the deposition of their remains. 



And many localities yield human bones and implements mingled 

 with remains of diluvial animals, especially of the mammoth, the 

 rhinoceros of the species previously described, and the cave-bear. 

 Especially rich in these combined relics are caves of Lenu and Som- 

 brive, in the department of Ariege, France, and of Engihoul and 

 Engis, near Llittich (Liege), Belgium. The contents of the latter two 



1 Maieriaux pour servir a I'histoire de Vhomme. 



2 Elaborately described by Dr. Fandel, of Colmar. 



