Antiquity of the Human Race. 73 



de Perthes, in 1849, in his ' Antiquities Celtiques,' while those of 

 Amiens were afterwards described in 1855, by the late Dr. Rigol-. 

 et. 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 obtained 

 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 deph of 10, and the other of 17 feet below the 

 surface, at the time of my visit; and M. Georges Poucht, 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 stra- 

 tified gravel resting immediately on the chalk in which these rudely 

 fashioned instruments are buried, belongs to the post-pliocent 

 period, all the fresh water and land shells which accompany them 

 being of existing species. The great number of the fossil instru- 

 ments which have been likened to hatchets, spearheads, 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 15 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 G-eorgia — a mound 10 acres in area, 

 and having an average height of five feet, cliiefly composed of cast- 

 away oyster shells, throughout which arrow-heads, stone-axes, and 

 Indian pottery are dispersed. If the neighbouring river, the Ala_ 

 tamaha, or the sea which is at hand, should invade, sweep away, 

 and stratify the contents of this mound, it might produce a very 

 analogous accumulation of human implements, unmixed perhaps 

 with human bones. Although the accompanying shells are of 

 living species, I believe the antiquity of the Abbeville and Amiens 

 flint instruments to be great indeed if compared to the times of 

 history or tradition. I consider the gravel to be of fluviatile ori- 

 gin, but I could detect nothing in the structure of its several parts 

 indicating cataclysmal action, nothing that might not be due to 

 such river-floods as we have witnessed in Scotland during the last 

 half century. It must have required a long period for the wear- 

 ing down of the chalk which supplied the broken flints for the 

 formation of so much gravel at various heights, sometimes 100 feet 

 above the present level of the Somme, for the deposition of fine 



