158 COMPARATIVE ARCH-EOLOGY. 
-hopeless. The fragmentary remains then available were 
either unrecognised as the work of man, or rejected as invalid 
evidence for the solution of the problem of man’s origin and 
antiquity. Moreover, the knowledge necessary to deal with 
the waifs and strays of the unwritten records involved new 
methods of inductive reasoning which took some time to come 
to maturity. It was not, therefore, till little more than half a 
century ago that isolated finds in caves and old river gravels, 
calculated to throw light on the history of man, assumed 
sufficient coherency to be formulated into a new science under 
the title of anthropology. As already remarked, want of 
knowledge of the handicraft work of early races was the 
principal impediment to pre-historic research. The Greeks 
and Romans regarded the ordinary polished stone axes, which 
were occasionally picked up in cultivated fields, as thunder- 
bolts (ceraunie), and professed to find them wherever light- 
ning was seen to strike the earth. The popular belief, that 
flint arrow-heads were the missiles of elves and fairies, was 
long prevalent in the folklore of Britain and other countries. 
Hence these mysterious objects came to be looked on as 
charms and talismen, to which supernatural] virtues were 
attributed, such as the power of healing diseases and averting 
threatened calamities, supposed to eminate from the evil eye 
and the incantations of witchcraft. Dr Belluci, of Perugia, 
in his catalogue of Italian amulets has tabulated, under the 
heading of Pierres de Foudre, 20 arrow-heads and 3 polished 
stone celts, which had been used as charms throughout the 
country. 
The discovery in the ancient gravels of the Somme valley 
of bones and teeth of the mammoth, rhinoceros, and other 
extinct animals, associated with almond-shaped flints which 
M. Boucher de Perthes regarded as the manufactured tools 
and weapons of the people who lived contemporaneously with 
these extinct animals, was absolutely ignored by his country- 
men for many years. In 1847 he published a report of his 
‘discoveries in three volumes, under the title of Antiquités 
Celtique et Antediluviennes, but the work lay unheeded till Dr 
Hugh Falkoner, F.R.S., visited his collection at Abbeville in 
1858. Dr Falkoner returned to London a convert to the 
