THK A\T1(|I'ITY OF MAX 1\ SOITII VFRK'l 

 AND EVOLITIOX. 



'' While we liave ])een straining' our eyes to the East, and 

 eagerly watching excavations in Egypt and Assyria, suddenly a 

 new light has arisen in the midst of us ; and the oldest relics 

 ol man yet discovered have occurred, not among the ruins of 

 Nineveh or Heliopolis, not on the sandy plains ol" the Nile, or 

 the Euphrates, hut in the pleasant valleys of England and 

 France, along the hanks of the Seine and the Somnie, the 

 Thames and the Waveney." Thus wrote Sir John Luhhock in 

 his " Prehistoric Times " twenty years ago. The " New Light," 

 a very dim and flickering flame at first, was kept hurning for 

 several years almost entirely hy the zeal and determination o^ 

 one man, M. Boucher de Perthes. In 1841, this discoverer, at 

 Menchecourt near Abheville, flrst found a rudely-fashioned flint 

 huried in some sand. The flint, so he surmised, had been 

 intended for a cutting instrument. For some years in the same 

 neighbourhood he continued starching, and found at intervals 

 several other shnilar weapons and several " so called " stone 

 hatchets. At length in 1840 he published his first work on the 

 subject. In this he announced that he had found human 

 implements in l)eds unmistakably belonging to the age of the 

 drift. On the strength of the discovery he contended that man 

 had existed on the earth contemporaneously with many now 

 extinct mammals whose remains are found in the drift, and that 

 the period of man's existence npon the earth must be pushed 

 back far beyond the limits hitherto assigned to it by Anti- 

 quarians. His astonished readers, with that hostile incredulity 

 which in all times has assailed new truths, regarded him as a 



