4i6 NINETEENTH CENTURY. pt. It 



This discovery, which was not believed for a long time, 

 was first announced by a French geologist, M. Boucher de 

 Perthes, in the year 1847. It happened that near this 

 gentleman's house, at Abbeville in Picardy, gravel-pits had 

 been dug from time to time for repairing the fortifications of 

 the town, or mending the roads. During these excavations, 

 in the beginning of the century, a great many bones of ani- 

 mals had been dug up and sent to Cuvier at Paris ; and he 

 stated that some of them belonged to animals slightly dif- 

 ferent from any now living, though not so ancient as those 

 which came from under Paris (see p. 397). This showed 

 that these beds of sandstone 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 * Antiquit^s Celtiques,' and it was not till 1858, when 

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

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

 undisturbed gravel with his own hands, that people began to 

 believe 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, 



