GEOLOGY. 331 



possible uses to which they may have been put. He discarded the supposi- 

 tion that they were "celts," pointing out that a celt is radically different in 

 form, being sharp at the wide and blunt at the narrow end, which is exactly 

 opposite to what is observed in the implements under discussion. In fact a 

 celt is a chisel, while these flints have apparently been used as weapons of 

 offence, and were probably arrow-heads. The author mentioned the fact of 

 an injury having been detected by Professor Owen in the fossil bone of an 

 I:-ish elk, and pointed out the possible connection between such injuries and 

 the implements under examination. 



In a paper communicated to Blackwood's Magazine for October, 1860, under 

 the title of " The Reputed Traces of Man Primeval," by Prof. Henry D. 

 Rogers, of the University of Glasgow, the whole subject of the occurrence 

 of the flint implements in the drift is ably reviewed, and all the adjunct 

 circumstances connected therewith clearly stated. " They occur," says 

 Professor R , who has personally 'made a scientific examination of the 

 localities, " in not inconsiderable numbers in the gravel-quarries or sand- 

 pits of Abbeville and Amiens, and also at a few spots bordering on the 

 wide valley of the river Somme, more sparsely on the Seine, at Paris, and 

 at one locality in England, namely, Hoxne, in Suffolk. It is estimated that 

 the total number of these 'worked flints' exhumed since their first detec- 

 tion by their eminent discoverer, M. Boucher de Perthes, of Abbeville, some 

 twenty years ago, exceeds fifteen hundred, and may even approach two 

 thousand specimens." 



" A preliminary conviction of the existence of the remains of antediluvian 

 man induced M. de Perthes to labor ten years subsequent to 1838 in search 

 of them, and though he found no human bones (which, we may remark, 

 might have been preserved as well as the osseous structure of the extinct 

 animals in the diluvium), he did strike upon these artificially shaped 

 flints having marks of human origin. Of these, it appears, he published 

 an elaborate description in 1847, which attracted but little notice until 

 his deductions were approved by M. Rigollot, who, in a pamphlet, recanted 

 his previous scepticism, and expi'essed his agreement with the conclusions 

 of M. de Perthes. Other learned geologists in France and England fol- 

 lowed on the same side, among them Joseph Prestwich, who, in 18o9, 

 read a paper on the subject before the Royal Society of London, and 

 J. W. Flower, who submitted in the same year to the Geological Society a 

 report on a flint implement discovered at the base of some beds of drift 

 gravel and brick earth at St. Acheul, near Amiens. The wrought flint here 

 referred to (which is figured in Blackwood) was found by the author lying 

 at the depth of sixteen feet from the surface, and about eighteen inches from 

 the face of the quarry, to which extent the gravel had been removed. 



"The embedding structure, or place of sepulture, of the wrought flints, 

 geologically regarded, is," says Professor Rogers, "for Abbeville, Amiens, 

 and the other localities on the Somme, a rudely deposited, irregularly strewn 

 bed of somewhat fragmentary chalk-flint, containing: some flint-sand, a little 

 pulverized chalk, and occasional large blocks or boulders, of a hard quartxose 

 Eocene sandstone. This evidently diluvial matrix, the repository also of 

 the bones of gigantic mammalian quadrupeds, rests direetl}' on a some- 

 whnt uneven and eroded floor of chalk, out of the wreck of the upper beds 

 of which stratum the nodules of flint forming the greater part of the gravel 

 have been derived. It is overlaid in its turn by no less than three other 

 strata, of aqueous origin, but all formed under dissimilar conditions. 



