CHAP. VI. DISCOVERIES OF M. BOUCHER DE PERTHES. 95 



therefore, were laid open, from twenty to thirty-five feet in 

 depth, and the bones of quadrupeds of the genera elephant, 

 rhinoceros, bear, hyena, stag, ox, horse, and others, were 

 found, and had been sent from time to time to Paris to be 

 examined and named by Cuvier, who described them in his 

 " Ossements Fossiles." A correct account of the associated 

 flint tools and of their position was given in 1847 by 

 M. Boucher de Perthes in his work above cited, and they 

 were stated to occur at various depths, often twenty or thirty 

 feet from the surface, in sand and gravel, especially in those 

 strata which were nearly in contact with the subjacent white 

 chalk. But the scientific world had no faith in the state- 

 ment that works of art, however rude, had been met with in 

 undisturbed beds of such antiquity. Few geologists visited 

 Abbeville in winter, when the sand-pits were open, and when 

 they might have opportunities of vei*ifying the sections, and 

 judging whether the instruments had really been imbedded 

 by natural causes in the same strata with the bones of the 

 mammoth, rhinoceros, and other extinct mammalia. Some 

 of the tools figured in the " Antiquites Celtiques" were so 

 rudel}^ shaped, that many imagined them to have owed their 

 peculiar forms to accidental fracture in a river's bed; others 

 suspected frauds on the part of the workmen, who might 

 have fabricated them for sale, or that the gravel had been 

 disturbed, and that the worked flints had got mingled with 

 the bones of the mammoth long after that animal and its 

 associates had disappeared from the earth. 



No one was more skeptical than the late eminent physician 

 of Amiens, Dr. Rigollot, who had long before (in the year 

 1819) written a memoir on the fossil mammalia of the valley 

 of the Somme. He was at length induced to visit Abbe- 

 ville, and, having inspected the collection of M. Boucher de 

 Perthes, i-eturned home resolved to look for himself for flint 

 tools in the gravel-pits near Amiens. There, accordingly, at 



