JET. 46.] BOUCHER DE PERTHES. 119 



were so important, bringing about so suddenly a re- 

 volution of opinion in the scientific world, that we 

 transcribe it in full : 



H. Falconer to J. Prestwich. ABBEVILLE, 1st Nov. 1858. 



MY DEAR PRESTWICH, As the weather continued fine, I de- 

 termined on coming here to see Boucher de Perthes' collection. 

 I advised him of my intention from London, and my note luckily 

 found him in the neighbourhood. He good-naturedly came in to 

 receive me, and I have been richly rewarded. His collection of 

 wrought flint implements and of the objects of every description 

 associated with them far exceeds anything I expected to have 

 seen, especially from a single locality. He had made great 

 additions, since the publication of his first volume, in the second 

 which I have now by me. He showed me "flint" hatchets 

 which lie had dug up with his oiim hands mixed indiscriminately 

 with the molars of E. primigenius. I examined and identified 

 plates of the molars and the flint objects, which were got along 

 with them. Abbeville is an out-of-the-way place, very little 

 visited, and the French savants who meet him in Paris laugh at 

 Monsieur de Perthes and his researches. But after devoting the 

 greater part of a day to his vast collection, I am perfectly satis- 

 fied that there is a great deal of fair presumptive evidence in 

 favour of many of his speculations regarding the remote anti- 

 quity of these industrial objects, and their association with 

 animals now extinct. Monsieur Boucher's hotel is from ground- 

 floor to garret a continued museum filled with pictures, medieval 

 art, and Gaulish antiquities, including antediluvian flint knives, 

 fossil bones, &c. If, during next summer, you should happen to 

 be paying a visit to France, let me strongly recommend you to 

 come to Abbeville. You could leave the following morning by 

 an 8 A.M. train to Paris, and I am sure you would be richly 

 rewarded. You are the only English geologist I know of who 

 would go into the subject con amore. I am satisfied that English 

 geologists are much behind the indications of the materials now 

 in existence relative to this walk of post - glacial geology, and 

 you are the man to bring up the leeway. Boucher de Perthes 

 is a very courteous elderly French gentleman, the head of an 



