384 EARLY EGYPTIAN DATES. chap. xix. 



terranean, whether in Algeria, Spain, the south of France, 

 Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Sicily, or the islands of the Medi- 

 terranean generally, whei-ever the bones of extinct mammalia, 

 such as the elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus, have 

 been found, it is not in the modern deltas of rivers or in the 

 alluvial plains, now overflowed when the waters are high, 

 that such fossil remains present themselves, but in situations 

 corresponding to the ancient gravels of the valley of the 

 Somme, in which the bones of the mammoth and the oldest 

 type of flint implements occur. 



If the Egyptian monarch, therefore, who sent Hanno to 

 circumnavigate Africa, or some earlier king than he, had com- 

 manded his admiral to sail past the Pillars of Hercules, and 

 then northwards as far as he could penetrate, leaving, before 

 he set out on his return, some monument to commemorate to 

 after-ages the Ultima Thule of his expedition at the most 

 northern point reached by him, and if we had now discovered 

 an obelisk of granite left by him at that era on the platform 

 of St. Acheul, near Amiens, its foundations might well have 

 occupied the precise position which the Gallo-Eoman tombs 

 now hold, as shown in fig. 21 A (p. 138). If they had dug 

 deep enough to exhume some teeth of the elephant, they 

 might easily have seen that they differed from the teeth of 

 their African species, and were distinct, like many other ac- 

 companying bones, from the animals then inhabiting the val- 

 ley of the Somme, or that of the Nile. The flint implements 

 would then have lain buried in the old gTavel as now, and 

 the only geological distinction between those times and ours 

 would be a diminished thickness of peat bordering the 

 Somme, the upper layers of which would not contain, as now, 

 Eoman antiquities, and some beds below, in Avhich Celtic 

 hatchets now occur, would have been wanting; but, with 

 this slight exception, the valley would have worn the same 

 aspect as at the era when the Eomans subdued Gaul. 



