94 report — 1859. 



by natural causes in their present matrix. But the rock in which they are en- 

 tombed consists of two parts, one of which is a compact, and for tbe most part thinly 

 laminated stone, into which none of the human bones penetrate ; the other con- 

 taining the bones is a lighter and much more porous stone, without lamination, 

 to wbich we could find nothing similar in the mountain of Denise, although both 

 M. Hebert and I made several excavations on the alleged site of the fossils. M. 

 Hebert therefore suggested to me that this more porous stone, which resembles in 

 coloiu- and mineral composition, though not in structure, parts of the genuine old 

 breccia of Denise, may be made up of the older rock broken up and afterwards re- 

 deposited, or as the French say, remanie, and therefore, of much newer date, an 

 hypothesis which well deserves consideration ; but I feel that we are at present 

 so ignorant of the precise circumstances and position under which these celebrated 

 human fossils were found, that I ought not to waste time in speculating on their 

 probable mode of interment, but simply state that, in my opinion, they afford no 

 demonstration of man having witnessed the last volcanic eruptions of Central 

 France. The skulls, according to the judgment of the most competent osteologists 

 who have yet seen them, do not seem to depart in a marked manner from the 

 modern European, or Caucasian type ; and the human bones are in a fresher state 

 than those of the Elejrfias meridionalis and other quadrupeds found in any breccia 

 of Denise which can be referred to the period even of the latest volcanic eruptions. . 



But while I have thus failed to obtain satisfactory evidence in favom* of the 

 remote origin assigned to the human fossils of Le Puy, I am fully prepared to 

 corroborate the conclusions which have been recently laid before the Royal Society 

 by Mr. Prestwich, in regard to the age of the flint implements associated in un- 

 disturbed gravel, in the north of France, with the bones of elephants, at Abbeville 

 and Amiens. These were first noticed at Abbeville, and their true geological 

 position assigned to them by M. Boucher de Perthes, in 1847, in his ' Antiquites 

 Celtiques,' while those of Amiens were afterwards described in 1854, by the late 

 Dr. Rigollot. For a clear statement of the facts, I may refer you to the abstract 

 of Mr. Prestwich's Memoir in the Proceedings of the Royal Society for 1859, 

 and have only to add that I have myself obtained abundance of flint implements 

 (some of which are laid upon the table) during a short visit to Amiens and Abbe- 

 ville. Two of the worked flints of Amiens were discovered in the gravel-pits of 

 St.-Acheul — one at the depth of 10, and the other of 17 feet below tbe surface, at 

 the time of my visit ; and M. Georges Pouchet, of Rouen, author of a work on 

 the Races of Man, wbo has since visited the spot, has extracted with his own hands 

 one of these implements, as Messrs. Prestwich and Flower had done before bim. 

 Tbe stratified gravel resting immediately on the chalk in which these rudely 

 fashioned instruments are buried, belongs to the post -pliocene period, all the fresh- 

 water and land shells which accompany them being of existing species. The great 

 number of the fossil instruments which have been likened to hatchets, spear-heads, 

 and wedges is truly wonderful. More than a thousand of them have already been 

 met with in the last ten years, in the valley of the Somme, in an area 15 miles in 

 length. I infer tbat a tribe of savages, to whom the use of iron was unknown, 

 made a long sojourn in this region ; and I am reminded of a large Indian mound, 

 which I saw in St. Simon's Island, in Georgia — a mound 10 acres in area, and 

 having an average height of 5 feet, chiefly composed of cast-away oyster shells, 

 throughout which arrow-heads, stone-axes, and Indian pottery are dispersed. If 

 the neighbouring river, the Alatamaha, or the sea which is at hand, shoidd invade, 

 sweep away, and stratify the contents of this mound, it might produce a very ana- 

 logous accumulation of human implements, unmixed perhaps with human bones. 



Although the accompanying shells are of living species, I believe the antiquity 

 of the Abbeville and Amiens flint instruments to be great indeed if compared to 

 the times of history or tradition. I consider the gravel to be of fluviatile origin ; 

 but I coidd detect nothing in the structure of its several parts indicating cataclysnial 

 action, nothing that might not be due to such river- floods as we have witnessed in 

 Scotland during the last half-century. It must have required a long period for the 

 wearing down of the chalk which supplied the broken flints for the formation of so 

 much gravel at various heights, sometimes 100 feet above the present level of the 

 Somme, — for the deposition of fine sediment including entire shells, both terrestrial 

 and aquatic, and also for the denudation which the entire mass of stratified drift 



