90 EXPLORATIONS OF THE BRIXHAM CAVE. CHAP. vi. 



a distance of about forty miles from Abbeville, he imme 

 diately found abundance of similar flint implements, precisely 

 the same in the rudeness of their make, and the same in their 

 geological position ; some of them in gravel nearly on a level 

 with the Somme, others in similar deposits resting on chalk at 

 a height of about ninety feet above the river. 



Dr. Eigollot having in the course of four years obtained 

 several hundred specimens of these tools, most of them from 

 St. Acheul in the south-east suburbs of Amiens, lost no 

 time in communicating an account of them to the scientific 

 world, in a memoir illustrated by good figures of the worked 

 flints and careful sections of the beds. These sections were 

 executed by M. Buteux, an engineer well qualified for the 

 task, who had written a good description of the geology of Pi- 

 cardy. Dr. Eigollot, in this memoir, pointed out most clearly 

 that it was not in the vegetable soil, nor in the brick-earth with 

 land and fresh- water shells next below, but in the lower beds 

 of coarse flint-gravel, usually twelve, twenty, or twenty-five 

 feet below the surface, that the implements were met with, just 

 as they had been previously stated by M. Boucher de Perthes 

 to occur at Abbeville. The conclusion, therefore, which was 

 legitimately deduced from all the facts, was that the flint 

 tools and their fabricators were coeval with the extinct mam 

 malia embedded in the same strata. 



Brixham Cave, near Torquay, Devonshire. 



Four years after the appearance of Dr. Eigollot's paper, a 

 sudden change of opinion was brought about in England 

 respecting the probable coexistence, at a former period, of 

 man and many extinct mammalia, in consequence of the 

 results obtained from a careful exploration of a cave at 

 Brixham, near Torquay, in Devonshire. As the new views 

 very generally adopted by English geologists had no small 



