v BELIEF AND EVIDENCE 115 



geologist who would inquire into their origin and associa- 

 tions con amore, to take an early opportunity of visiting 

 Abbeville. Prestwich had made the gravels of England 

 the subject of particular study, and was, therefore, well 

 qualified to examine the proofs of the antiquity of man 

 yielded by similar deposits in France. It was said of 

 him, in mingled earnest and raillery, " point out a broken 

 pebble amongst a thousand others in a gravel pit, and 

 there is one who will tell you the point of the compass 

 from which it came, the stratum which yielded it, the 

 distance it had travelled, the amount of rolling it had 

 undergone, and the time it had occupied in its 

 journey." 



Prestwich went to Abbeville and Amiens in 1859 and, 

 with Sir John Evans, examined both beds of gravel 

 and flint implements, with the result that he convinced 

 himself of the following facts : (1) that the flint imple- 

 ments are the work of man, (2) that they were found in 

 undisturbed ground, (3) that they are associated with 

 the remains of extinct mammals, (4) that the period 

 represented by the deposits containing the flint imple- 

 ments was late in geological time, and preceded that in 

 which the surface assumed its present outline. 



In these conclusions we have definite statements of 

 fact in which no attempt is made to account for them 

 or consider their significance. It was certain that 

 primitive man existed in the north of France at the 

 same time as animals which had become extinct, for 

 his flint weapons were found associated with their bones. 

 Also, the old valley-gravels in which the relics occurred 

 must have been deposited before the ground took its 

 present configuration ; that is, long before historic 

 times. Whether the gravels with their flint implements 

 and other remains represented an epoch thousands or 



