TERTIARY MAN (PLIOCENE AND PLEISTOCENE) 35 



tologist Gaudry was inclined to assign to the Dryopithecus 

 similar fragments collected from the Tertiary limestone of 

 Beauce, near Paris, by Abbe Bourgeois. Since Mortillet took 

 up the subject, the Pleistocene flint tools, the so-called " eoliths," 

 have never ceased to be brought forward as proof of man's 

 existence towards the end of the Tertiary or beginning of the 

 Quaternary period, Rutot, in France, and Klaatsch, in Germany, 

 vigorously defending the theory. In judging doubtful flint 

 implements of the Upper Tertiary strata Mortillet attached the 

 greatest importance to the bulbe de percussion, Rutot to the 

 retouche. Rutot does not admit the possibility of their having 

 been formed by natural agencies (change of temperature, strong 

 water-currents, sea-waves, movements of strata), and his investi- 

 gation of various strata led him to classify the consecutive zones 

 as Reutelia, Mesvinia and Mesvino-Chelle'a. 



Besides hewn stones, specimens of which are said to have 

 been found also in Portugal by Ribeiro, carvings on bones were 

 regarded as proofs of the existence of Tertiary man, and are 

 thought to have been produced by means of a flint instrument. 

 Capellini found crescent-shaped carvings on the bones of a 

 Balaenotus, Desnoyers has drawn attention to carvings on bones 

 of the Tertiary Period from the sand-quarries of St. Prest, and 

 von Diicker believed he had found traces of man's work on the 

 bones of a hipparion from Pikermi (Greece). 



Virchow and Ranke hesitated to pronounce the Tertiary 

 flints the work of man. Virchow, while admitting the possibility 

 of other explanations, inclined to the bslief that they had been 

 cleft by fire. Zittel, 1 the geologist and palaeontologist, ex- 

 presses himself more positively. In the flint fragments in ques- 

 tion, he sees merely the work of natural agencies, fragments that 

 have been split asunder by meteorological processes and re- 

 sembling those, for instance, that are scattered for miles over 

 the surface of the Libyan desert. Homes 2 shares this view in 

 very particular, and regards the so-called flint implements of 

 the Upper Tertiary strata, brought forward by Rutot, and 

 defended by Klaatsch, as merely illusory natural phenomena. 

 There would be no difficulty in collecting from the thousands of 



'Zittel, Handbitch der Paliiontologie. Munchen, 1893, vol. iv., p. 710. 

 2 Homes. Der diluviale Menscti in Eitropa. Braunschweig, 1903, p. 22. 



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