PREADAMITE MAN. 123 



inspected the collection of M. Boucher de la Perthes; he then 

 returned home to look himself for flint tools in the Amiens 

 gravel-pits. There, about forty miles from Abbeville, he found 

 abundance, exactly as M. Boucher de la Perthes had recorded. 

 Dr. Rigollot communicated the results of his discovery to the 

 scientific world in an able memoir. He distinctly pointed 

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

 with land and freshwater shells next below, but in the under- 

 lying beds of flint-gravel twelve, twenty, even twenty-five 

 feet below the surface that the flint tools were discovered. 

 To his mind the inevitable deduction was, that the flint tools 

 (and of course the makers of them) were contemporaneous 

 with the mammoth, the three-homed rhinoceros, the cave- 

 bear, hyena, and other extinct species, of which the bones 

 were found in company with them. This brings us up in 

 point of time to the cave-exploration at Brixham, near Tor- 

 quay, which took place four years after the publication of 

 Dr. Eigollot's monograph. 



Although, then, the public expression of belief in the 

 prehistorical existence of man is an event of only a few years, 

 a private under-current of contrary belief has existed during 

 the last half-century; the occurrence from time to time of 

 human bones, and the evidences of human handiwork, having 

 caused the opinion to prevail that man's advent upon earth 

 must be referred to some earlier date than had been imagined. 

 These evidences. had been found in the superficial deposits 

 termed drift or diluvium, and also in caves. They had been 

 often found in association with remains of extinct species, such 

 as of the hyena tribe, the bear, elephant, and rhinoceros. 

 The opinion grew slowly, and for a reason almost too obvious 

 to need mention. If it be accepted, then the Mosaic account 

 of creation in respect of time at least must be repudiated. 

 Under the pressure of this conviction, naturalists manifested 

 a reserve in speaking and writing of this matter that their 

 private opinions belied ; nor was it until every plausible hypo- 



