&l. 47.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 123 



a vehement opposer of the views of M. de Perthes 

 until he had personally examined the ground and the 

 evidence, when his opinions underwent a complete 

 change, and he became one of the strongest advocates 

 for the recognition of the worked flints. 



Throughout the whole of this famous inquiry, which 

 had been prompted by that letter of 1st November, 

 1858, from Hugh Falconer, with characteristic gener- 

 osity the latter invariably assigned the precedence to 

 Prestwich, saying, " What I did was to stir up the 

 embers of your interest in the matter into a quick 

 flame." 



In a chapter on " Primeval Man and his Contem- 

 poraries," 1 Falconer remarks of MM. de Perthes and 

 Eigollot, that 



The observations of both were either scorned or discredited. 

 At the same time a quiet observer, of matchless sagacity and 

 indomitable perseverance, Mr Prestwich, was making the Gravels 

 in England an object of special investigation. Engaged during a 

 long course of years upon the study of the European Tertiaries, 

 he gradually worked his way up to the superficial deposits. Mr 

 Prestwich's researches upon the Tertiaries, which have only been 

 partially published, have earned for him the reputation of being 

 one of the ablest geological observers of his time. But in the 

 Quaternary sands and gravels he was unrivalled. Men have 

 been in the habit of saying, in mingled earnest and raillery, that 

 " point out a broken pebble amongst a thousand others in a gravel 

 pit, and there is one who will tell you the point of the compass 

 from which it came, the stratum which yielded it, the distance 

 it had travelled, the amount of rolling it had undergone, and the 

 time it had occupied in the journey." The power thus acquired 

 was soon to be applied with clenching authority to the proofs of 

 the antiquity of man yielded by those deposits. 



On his memorable visit to Abbeville in April, Prest- 



1 Hugh Falconer : ' Palseont. Memoirs,' vol. ii. p. 584. 



