394 British Association, 



notice at your last Meeting, at Aberdeen, by Sir Charles Lyell, in 

 his opening address to the Geological Section. Since that time 

 many French and English naturalists have visited the valley of the 

 Somme in Picardy, and confirmed the opinion originally publish- 

 ed by M. Boucher de Perthes, in 184*7, and afterwards confirm- 

 ed by Mr. Prestwich, Sir C. Lyell, and other geologists, from 

 personal examination of that region. It appears that the posi- 

 tion of the rude flint-implements, which are unequivocally of 

 human workmanship, is such, at Abbeville and Amiens, as to 

 show that they are as ancient as a great mass of gravel which 

 fills the lower parts of the valley between those two cities, extend- 

 ing above and below them. This gravel is an ancient fluviatile 

 alluvium by no means confined to the lowest depressions (where 

 extensive and deep peat-mosses now exist), but is sometimes also 

 seen covering the slopes of the boundary hills of chalk at eleva- 

 tions of 80 or 100 feet above the level of the Somme. Changes, 

 therefore, in the physical geography of the country, comprising 

 both the filling up with sediment and drift, and the partial re- 

 excavation of the valley, have happened since old river-beds were, 

 at some former period, the receptacles of the worked flints. The 

 number of these last, already computed at above 1,400 in an area of 

 fourteen miles in length, and half a mile in breadth, has aff"orded 

 to a succession of visitors abundant opportunities of verifying the 

 true geological position of the implements. 



The old alluvium, whether at higher or lower levels, consists not, 

 only of the coarse gravel with worked flints above mentioned 

 but also of superimposed beds of sand and loam, in which are 

 many freshwater and land shells, for the most part entire, and of 

 species not living in the same part of France. With the shells 

 are found bones of the Mammoth and an extinct Rhinoceros, H, 

 tichorhinus, an extinct species of Deer, and fossil remains of the 

 Horse, Ox, and other animals. These are met with in the overlying 

 beds, and sometimes also in the gravel where the implements occur. 

 At Menchecourt, in the suburbs of Abbeville, a nearly entire skel- 

 eton of the Siberian Rhinoceros is said to have been taken out about 

 forty years ago, a fact afi'ording an answer to the question 

 often raised, as to whether the bones of the extinct mammalia 

 could have been washed out of an older alluvium into a newer 

 one, and so redeposited and mingled with the relics of human 

 workmanship. Far-fetched as was this hypothesis, I am informed 

 that it would not, if granted, have seriously shaken the proof of 



