96 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. Rigollot having in the course of four years obtained 

 several hundred specimens of these tools, most of them from 

 St. Acheul, in the southeast subui'bs of Amiens, lost no 

 time in communicating an account of them to the scientific 

 world, in a memoir illustrated b}^ 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 

 Picardy. 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, twent}', 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 wei-e coeval 

 with the extinct mammalia imbedded in the same strata. 



Brixhani Cave, near Torquay, Devonshire. 



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

 Budden 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 



