ON THE PROGRESS OP SCIENCE. VII 



and mineral composition, though not in structure, parts of the genuine 

 old breccia of Denise, may be made up of the older rock, broken up, 

 and afterwards re-deposited, or, as the French say, remane, and 

 therefore of much newer date ; an hypothesis which well deserves con- 

 sideration ; but I feel that we are, at present, so ignorant of the precise 

 circumstances and position under which these celebrated human fossils 

 were found, that I ought not to waste time in speculating on their 

 probable mode of interment, but simply state that, in my opinion, they 

 aiTbrd no demonstration of Man having witnessed the last volcanic 

 eruptions of Central France. The skulls, according to the judgment 

 of most competent osteologists who have yet seen them, do not seem 

 to depart in a marked manner from the modern European, or Cau- 

 casian, type, and the human bones are in a fresher state than those of 

 the Elephas meridionalis and other quadrupeds found in any breccia 

 of Denise which can be referred to the period even of the latest 

 volcanic eruptions. But, while I have thus failed to obtain satis- 

 factory evidence in favor of the remote origin assigned to the human 

 fossils of Le Puy, 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. These were first noticed at 

 Abbeville, and their true geological position assigned to them by M. 

 Boucher de Perthes, in 1849, in his ' Antiquites Celtiques,' while 

 those of Amiens were afterwards described in 1855, by the late Dr. 

 Rigollot. For a clear statement of the facts, I may refer you to 

 the abstract of Mr. Prestwich's Memoir, in the Proceedings of the 

 Royal Society for 1859, and have only to add that I have myself ob- 

 tained abundance of Flint Implements (some of which are laid upon 

 the table) during a short visit to Amiens and Abbeville. Two of the 

 worked flints of Amiens were discovered in the gravel-pits of St. 

 Acheul one at the depth of ten, and the other of seventeen feet be- 

 low the surface, at the time of my visit; and M. Georges Pouchet, of 

 Rouen, author of a work on the Races of Man, who has since visited 

 the spot, has extracted with his own hands one of these implements, 

 as Messrs. Prestwich and Flower had done before him. The stratified 

 gravel resting immediately on the chalk in which these rudely 

 iashioned instruments are buried, belongs to the post-pliocene period, 

 all the freshwater and land shells which accompany them being of ex- 

 isting species. The great number of the fossil instruments, which have 

 been likened to hatchets, spear-heads, and wedges, is truly wonderful. 

 More than a thousand of them have already been met with, in the last 

 ten years, in the valley of the Somme, in an area fifteen miles in 

 length. 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 in St. Simond's Island, in 



