46 Primitive Man. 



thereby a more reverent conception of the totality of 

 Nature and of Man, and may be reconciled to the loss of 

 that which the more credulous past held worthy of belief; 

 for as these myths of ancient times have enriched the 

 imagination, and stimulated the faith in an Unknown, so 

 have they entered into tlie life of the Present, which is the 

 sum of all the Past, and have but been transformed into 

 loftier ideals. 



The establishment, within a recent period, upon a satis- 

 factory scientific basis, of the fact of the great antiquity of 

 man upon the earth, was primarily due to the results of 

 investigations regarded, at the time, as of but slight conse- 

 quence, and therefore, like so many other preludes to the 

 discovery of important scientific truths, wholly under- 

 valued, and, indeed, for a considerable time, wholly disre- 

 garded. The credit of inaugurating the line of research 

 Avhereby has been ultimately demonstrated the existence of 

 primitive races for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of 

 years anterior to all historic records, belongs to the French 

 scientist, M. Boucher de Perthes. Possessed by the energy 

 and enthusiasm of a truly scientific spirit, he devoted him- 

 self from the year 1830 to 1841 to a thorough exploration 

 of the ancient caves, peat-mosses and diluvial deposits in 

 the vicinity of Abbeville, and in the valley of the Somme, 

 in France. During this five-years' labor he unearthed a 

 large quantity of flint weapons and tools of various kinds, 

 evidently shaped by artificial means, having surfaces and 

 edges roughly chipped, and obviously designed for use as 

 spears, arrow-heads, axes, knives and hammers. The ques- 

 tion immediately suggested was as to the age of these 

 inqdements. To this geology furnished a reply. Tlie 

 objects were found to be incrusted with material of a 

 yellowish tinge, clearly not due to the substance of the ob- 

 jects themselves, but to the ferruginous nature of the soil in 

 which they had been imbedded. In a certain layer of the 

 diluvium was found the character of such deposit as would 

 have caused the incrustation, and, if the objects were 

 imbedded in it at the time of its formation, some approx- 

 imate idea could be obtained as to the age of the inqjle- 

 ments. "If," as he says in his report upon these investi- 

 gations, as quoted by Prof. Joly in his work, " Man before 

 Metals," ''they were in tlie bed from tlie beginning, tlie 

 problem was solved, and the man who made the implement 



