332 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERT. 



"First above the bone and hatchet entombing gravel lies a grayish-white 

 and brownish sand, imbedding several species of fresh-water and terrestrial 

 shells, identical with species now living in this part of the globe. Though 

 fine-grained, these sands bear the marks of a rather brief process of dep- 

 osition, for portions of them are unusually angular, or unworn in the 

 grain, and their laminae in many places bend and wave to conform to the 

 greatly eroded and undulating floor of the gravel on which they repose. 

 Solitary specimens of the worked flints are, on rare occasions, met with in 

 the lower part of these sands, and also, as rarely, the bones of the fossil 

 elephant. 



" Third in ascending order above the chalk occurs a second gravel, com- 

 posed exclusively of chalk-flints in a rolled and more or less fractured condi- 

 tion. This bed, varying in thickness, at St. Acheul, near Amiens, from two 

 to five feet, exhibits conspicuously at this locality the marks of having been 

 deposited or pushed along in very turbulent waters; for its lower boun- 

 dary, beheld in section at the gravel-pits, shows a succession of sharply- 

 conical, and somewhat spiral, deep depressions in the upper surface of 

 the sand beneath it, identical in ever} r feature with the funnel-shaped pits 

 bored by any strong, swiftly-eddying current in a yielding bottom of mud 

 or sand. 



" Fourth, and uppermost in the series of loose beds, is a brown brick-earth 

 or ferruginous sandy clay or loam, interspersed with numerous small splin- 

 ters of chalk-flint. At St. Acheul, and elsewhere near Amiens, where it is 

 used extensively for conversion into bricks, this loam, which is but faintly 

 laminated, is generally about three or four feet thick. Like the torrential 

 gravel on which it rests, it is destitute not only of mammalian organic 

 remains, but of the curious instruments in flint associated with them in the 

 lowermost of the four superficial deposits. It does enclose some remains of 

 another sort, which, when viewed in their relations to the vestiges of man 

 beneath them, never fail greatly to impress the beholder by the contrasts 

 they suggest in time and the state of human art. These are numerous 

 Roman graves, or rather regularly-shaped stone coffins, of unquestioned 

 Roman antiquity, oftentimes containing the skeletons of their inmates in a 

 firm and well-conserved state. When the student of time, deciphering these 

 four successive chapters in the physical history of our globe, drops his gaze 

 from these tombs, which descend but a small yard below the grass, yet 

 take him back through almost one-third of the usually imagined lifetime of 

 the world, and lets his vision, pausing at intervals upon the monuments 

 of alternate past ages of repose and epochs of turbulent floods, rest at last, 

 some twelve or sixteen feet lower in the earth, on a physical record, to him 

 as expressive as the graves above, of the past existence, near the same spot, 

 of a race of men unacquainted with the metals, what wonder, with his 

 critical spirit prostrated before his imagination, that he should forget to 

 scrutinize the evidence, and should quit the ground with the sentiment which 

 he confounds with a logical conviction of the vastness of the ages covered by 

 the record? His inquisitiveness keenly aroused by this impression, he inter- 

 rogates afresh the pages of this stony register for other and more palpable 

 proofs of the human beings, and the extreme age indicated in the objects he 

 has beheld; and perplexed at the total absence of any traces of man himself, 

 of even a single human tooth, or fragment of a human bone, where other 

 teeth and other bones no better capable of preservation are of common 

 occurrence, he withdraws a second time from the scene, cogitating many 



