ETHNOLOGY AND ARCHAEOLOGY. 499 



Rouen, fiuthor of a worl: on the ' Races of Man,' v>-!io has since visited the spot, 

 has extracted with his owu hands one of these implements, as Messrs. Prestwick 

 and Flower had done before him. The stratified grave!, resting immediately on 

 the chalk in which these rudely-fashioned instruments are bui'ied, belongs to the 

 post-pliocene period, all the fresh water and land shells which accompany thera 

 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 have already been met with in the last ten years, in the valley of 

 the Somme, in an area fifteen miles in length. I infer that 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. Siraond's Island, in 

 Georgia, — a mound ten acres in area, and having an average height of five feet, 

 chiefly composed of cast-away oyster shells, throughout which arrow heads, stone 

 axes, and Indian pottery are dispersed. If the neighbouring river, the Ahita- 

 maha, or the sea which is at hand, should invade, sweep away, and stratify the 

 contents of this mound, it might produce a very analogous 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 tra- 

 dition. I consider the gravel to be of fluviatile origin, but I could detect nothing 

 in the structure of its several parts indicating cataelysmal action ; notliing that 

 might not be due to such river- fioodi 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 th« formation of so much gravel at 

 various heights, sometimes one hundred 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 driit 

 has undergone, portions having been swept away, so that what remains of it of en 

 terminates abrubtly in old river-clifFi, besides being covered by a newer unstrrtti 

 fied di'ift. To explain these changes, I should infer considerable oscillations in 

 the level of the land in that part of Prance — slow movements of upheaval and 

 subsidence, deranging, but not wholly displacing, the cour.-e of the ancient i ivers. 

 Lastly, the disappearance of the elephant, rhinocero.=!, and other genera of quadru- 

 peds now foreign to Europe, implies, in like manner, a vast hipse of ages, separa- 

 ting the era in which the fossil implements were framed and that of the invafiou 

 of Gaul by the Romans. 



" Among the problems of high theoretical interest which the recent ps-ogrcss of 

 Geology and Ifatural History has brought into notice, no one is more prominent, 

 and at the same time more obscu)-e, than that relating to the origin of species. On 

 this difficult and mysterious subject, a work will very shortly i;ppear, by Mr. 

 Charles Darwin, the result of twenty years of observation and experiment in 

 Zoology, Botany, and Geology, by which he has been led to the conclusion, that 

 those powers of nature which give rise to races and permanent varieties in animals 

 and plants, are the same as those which, in much longer periods, produce species, 

 and, in a still longer period of ages, give rire to differences of generic rank. He 

 appears to me to have succeeded, by his investigations and reasonings, to have 

 thrown a flood of light on many classes of pheuojaena connected with the affiui- 



