CH. XL. BOUCHER DE PERTHES. 453 



of animals had been dug up and sent to Cuvier at Paris ; 

 and he stated that some of them belonged to animals 

 slightly different from any now living, though not so ancient 

 as those which came from under Paris (see p. 420). This 

 showed that these beds of gravel must have been formed 

 long before the times of history or the earliest ages in which 

 man was supposed to have been upon the earth. People, 

 therefore, were much astonished when M. Boucher de 

 Perthes stated in 1847 that he had found very rough stone 

 weapons in these beds, such as savages might use, seeming 

 to prove that men must have been living at the same time 

 as these extinct animals. 



This seemed so incredible that scientific men would not 

 even listen to Boucher de Perthes' arguments in his work 

 called ' Antiquite's Celtiques,' and it was not till 1858, when 

 one of our best living geologists, Mr. Prestwich, went to 

 Abbeville and took a well-shaped flint hatchet out of the 

 undisturbed gravel with his own hands, that people began 

 to think that human beings must have been living in the 

 world much longer than had hitherto been believed. When, 

 however, this was once acknowledged to be true, several 

 new facts sprang up to confirm the theory. Many years 

 before, in 1825, a Roman Catholic priest, the Rev. J. Mac- 

 Enery, had found flint tools, with the bones of the extinct 

 elephant, hyaena, and bear, in a cave 'called Kent's Hole, 

 near Torquay, but very little notice had been taken of this 

 discovery. Now, however, they were thoroughly studied, 

 and they showed clearly that men who made rough flint 

 tools (such as are still made by savages in many parts of the 

 world) must have lived in England, together with a bear, 

 an elephant, a lion, and a hyaena, all of species which have 

 now ceased to exist. 



Discovery of the Swiss -Lake dwellings, 1853. 



