122 PEEADAMITE MAN. 



The first great emancipation of thought relative to man's 

 prehistorical antiquity was accomplished thirteen years after 

 the publication of Schmerling's researches, by M. Boucher de 

 la Perthes, who discovered some flint implements at Abbe- 

 ville, in Picardy, so geologically associated as to leave no 

 doubt in his mind relative to their prehistorical antiquity. 

 M. Boucher de la Perthes was an antiquarian as well as a 

 palaeontologist. He discovered a difference of character be- 

 tween those flint instruments and others of the same material, 

 but of a later period, and called celts. He began to collect 

 these implements in 1841, subsequently to which time they 

 have been frequently dug out. It was with the French as 

 with the Belgian palaeontologist : the scientific world had no 

 faith in his deductions; they mostly would not believe that 

 works of art, however rude, had been met with in undisturbed 

 beds of such antiquity. Various theories were propounded to 

 explain away the deduction founded on the instruments of 

 wrought flint. Might some of them not have owed their 

 peculiar forms to accidental fracture ? Might not the work- 

 men have committed frauds 1 The gravel might have been 

 disturbed, the wrought flints of a later period might have got 

 mingled with the bones of an earlier period. It was even 

 suggested that gun-flints might have been manufactured on 

 the spot, and that the reputed antediluvian hatchets, knives, 

 and arrow-heads might be only the refuse chippings. 



Foremost amongst the sceptics as to the deductions of M. 

 Boucher de la Perthes was the late Dr. Bigollot of Amiens. 

 He had written in the year 1819 a memoir on the fossil 

 mammalia of the valley of the Somme, not heeding the flint 

 implements, which rose to so much importance under M. 

 Boucher de la Perthes. He would not believe in the recorded 

 proofs of man's antiquity; so the change wrought on his 

 thoughts, after having visited the scene of M. Boucher de la 

 Perthes' labours and investigated for himself, must be accepted 

 as wholly devoid of previous bias. He went to Abbeville ; he 



