lO TRANS. ST. LOUIS ACAD. SCIENCE. 



ened stakes have been reported from the Pliocene deposits of 

 Switzerland, but the work was so rudely done that it was consid- 

 ered doubtful by some whether it were the work of man or the 

 beaver. In 1S72, M. Bourgeois, produced worked flints from the 

 Miocene marls of Thenay in France, which were then thought by 

 some archasologists to be mere sports of nature, so rude was the 

 workmanship. But in 1873 more perfect specimens of well- 

 chipped spear-heads from the same marls, produced before the 

 Anthropological Society of France, were pronounced by M. Mor- 

 tillet to be unquestionably of human workmanship ; and he 

 claimed the right to speak of "Tertiary man, or (more exactly) 

 the precursors of man." Dr. Paul Broca recognizes these facts 

 as collected by competent observers, as accepted by many emi- 

 nent savans, and as showing "the existence of an intelligent being 

 who knew how to cut flint, and who could be nothing else than 

 man," in the Middle Miocene ; but he conceives that they are "not 

 yet sufficiently numerous nor incontestable to constitute definitive 

 proof" and to place Tertiary man "on the platform of science." 



Thus we find traces of human workmanship so rude and indis- 

 tinct that it is difficult to determine whether it was the work 

 of art or nature. It has been objected that no one species of 

 mammal of Miocene age had come down unchanged to the pres- 

 ent time, and that these Miocene evidences of human agency were 

 so immensely anterior to the Qiiaternary men of the flint inTple- 

 ments as scarcely to be credible or admissible. But it has been 

 answered, and very justly, that by the light of zoological science 

 it is not at all necessary to suppose that these Miocene men were 

 even of the same species as those of the Qiiaternary epoch ; un- 

 less, indeed, the idea of a species must include types as low in 

 the scale as the Gorilla. There must certainly have been a time 

 when the earliest creatures which we would venture to call hu- 

 man were just beginning to learn how to chip flints and sharpen 

 stakes. The African gorilla knows how to build a platform for 

 his bed on the branches of a tree, and it is said he will come down 

 and warm himself by the fire which the hunter has left ; but he 

 does not know enough to put on more wood to keep the fire burn- 

 ing. His reason does not see the logical connection between the 

 fire and the wood, and his eye has never discovered the sequence 

 of fact. • 



