122 BOUCHER DE PERTHES. [l859. 



ceeded to Abbeville to make the acquaintance of 

 M. Boucher de Perthes, whom he found a hale, hearty 

 septuagenarian, enthusiastic, as well he might be, about 

 his collection of flint implements. In France he was 

 well known as an antiquary and archaeologist and a 

 voluminous writer of light literature, perhaps no man 

 was ever more possessed by the cacoethes scribendi, 

 yet in England few had ever heard mention of his 

 name. Although not a geologist, his name is so 

 inseparably associated with the discovery of flint im- 

 plements in beds of Quaternary age in France, that 

 a few notes to recount his discoveries may not be 

 out of place. 



With a far-seeing sagacity which cannot but excite 

 our admiration, M. de Perthes had predicted the cer- 

 tainty of his finding traces of man in the gravels of the 

 Abbeville and Amiens district, and had during several 

 years closely watched the excavations for the construc- 

 tion of a canal at Abbeville. Hence when in 1846 he 

 announced the discovery of an ancient flint imple- 

 ment in gravel of the " Drift," associated with bones 

 of elephant, rhinoceros, and other extinct animals, 

 and when again in 1849 he asserted that numbers of 

 rudely worked and chipped flint implements had been 

 found with remains of extinct mammalia in the same 

 undisturbed beds of gravel, geologists gave no heed to 

 his announcement, and he was regarded as an amiable 

 visionary. He challenged his countrymen to put his 

 startling theory of so high an antiquity for his flint 

 weapons to the test and make excavations for them- 

 selves in unbroken ground, but he was only laughed 

 at. Dr Rigollot of Amiens appears to have been the 

 one person in France who came forward expressing 

 his dissent from the universal unbelief. He had been 



