238 



ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 



Lord Wrottesley, in his inaugural address to the late meeting 

 of the British Association at Oxford, thus referred to the above great 

 geological question: — 



"The bearing of some recent geological discoveries on the great 

 question of the high Antiquity of Man was brought before your 

 notice at your last meeting, at Aberdeen, by Sir Charles Lyell, in 

 his opening address to the Geological Section. Since that time 

 many French and English naturalists have visited the valley of the 

 Somme in Picardy, and confirmed the opinion originally published 

 by M. Boucher de Perthes, in 1847, and afterwards confirmed by 

 Mr. Prestwich, Sir C. Lyell, and other geologists, from personal 

 examination of that region. It appears that the position of the rude 

 flint-implements, which are unequivocally of human workmanship, 

 is such, at Abbeville and Amiens, as to show that they are as 

 ancient as a great mass of gravel which fills the lower parts of the 

 valley between those two cities, extending above and below them. 

 This gravel is an ancient fluviatile alluvium, by no means confined to 

 the lowest depressions (where extensive and deep peat-mosses now 

 exist), but is sometimes also seen covering the slopes of the boundary 

 hills of chalk at elevations of 80 or 100 feet above the level of the 

 Somme. Changes, therefore, in the physical geography of the 

 country, comprising both the tilling up with sediment and drift, and 

 the partial re-excavation of the valley, have happened since old river- 

 beds were, at some former period, the receptacles of the worked flints. 

 The number of these last, already computed at above 1400 in an 

 area of fourteen miles in length, and half a mile in breadth, has 

 afforded to a succession of visitors abundant opportunities of verify- 

 ing the true geological position of the implements. 



"The old alluvium, whether at higher or lower levels, consists not 

 only of the coarse gravel with worked flints, above mentioned, but 

 also of superimposed beds of sand and loam, in which are many fresh- 

 water and land shells, for the most part entire, and of species now 

 living in the same part of France. With the shells are found bones 

 of the mammoth and an extinct rhinoceros, II. tichorhinus, an 

 extinct species of deer, and fossil remains of the horse, ox, and 

 other animals. These are met with in the overlying beds, and some- 

 times also in the gravel where the implements occur. At Menche- 

 court, in the suburbs of Abbeville, a nearly entire skeleton of the 

 Siberian rhinoceros is said to have been taken out about forty years 

 a^o, a fact affording an answer to the question often raised, as to 

 whether the bones of the extinct mammalia could have been washed 

 out of an older alluvium into a newer one, and so redeposited and 

 mingled with the relics of human workmanship. Far fetched as was 

 this hypothesis, I am informed that it would not, if granted, have 

 seriously shaken the proof of the high antiquity of the human pro- 



