40 Recieics — Robinson's Flints, Fancies, and Facts. 



an antiquary does not depend upon the verdict of Mr. William 

 Eobinson : nor are these the only flint implements of a rude and 

 early type known in this country ; and, moreover, it has never been 

 pretended, except by that ingenious writer, that any one of them is 

 of Palseolithic age. 



The author is good enough to observe that "so far as" his " remarks 

 are depreciatory, they are not intended to apply to Iteliqiiice Aqui- 

 taniccB, a yet unfinished work, which is chiefly descriptive, and 

 illustrated by fine plates, and which is published — at, we presume, 

 considerable pecuniary loss — in memory of Mr. Christy, by his sur- 

 viving friends." This would have been consolatory to M. Lartet, 

 and no doubt is so to the Christy Trustees, and Professor T. Eupert 

 Jones, the accomplished editor of the Beliquice Aquitanicce. 



Of M. Boucher de Perthes, who died 2nd August, 1868,^ the 

 author observes : " Since this article was prepared, intelligence has 

 reached this country of the decease of M. Boucher de Perthes, a 

 gentleman of Picardy, and author of more than forty volumes, who, 

 rather than any other, may be styled the founder of that school 

 which has for the prominent article of its creed, belief in "the 

 antiquity of man." Mr. Eobinson derives a page or two of fun out 

 of M. de Perthes "Antiquites Celtiques et Antediluviennes," pre- 

 tending to imagine that because M. de Perthes collected queer- 

 shaped flints (like our friend Major- General Twemlow, of Guildford), 

 under the supposition they were remains of organic beings, or 

 tokens of human ingenuity, that therefore all the rest of the objects 

 that his museum contained were equally valueless and untrustworthy. 

 He also, as so many other writers have done, ridicules the excite- 

 ment created in April, 1863, by the discovery of the celebrated 

 Moulin-Quignon Jaw, associated with flint-implements of the drift- 

 type, which led to the Conference of Antiquaries and Geologists at 

 Paris and Abbeville in May, 1863. Mr. Eobinson does not state 

 the truth as to the nature of the evidence relied upon in the 

 case of the flint-implements from the valley of the Somme, when he 

 says "that the theories which Lyell and Lubbock have deduced from 

 the flint phenomena of that valley rest mainly, if not solely, on the 

 ingenious frauds of the workmen" (p. 13). So long ago as October, 

 1858, Dr. Falconer visited Abbeville, and saw in M. de Perthes col- 

 lection (then quite unknown to fame) genuine flint implements, 

 (agreeing with those from the Brixham Cave), exhumed by Perthes 

 himself, and associated with the molars of Elephas primigenius 

 (Falconer's Palaeontological Memoirs, vol. ii., p. 597). 



" I arrived," says Dr. Falconer, " at the conviction that they were 

 of contemporaneous age, although I was not prepared to go along 

 with M. De Perthes in all his inferences regarding the symbolical 

 hieroglyphics, and an industrial interpretation of the various other 

 objects which he had met with" (ibid, p. 597). 



With regard to the forgeries. Dr. Falconer justly observes, 

 " The great demand for flint-implements arises from the number 



1 See Ms Obituary Notice, Geol. Mag., 1868, Vol. V., October Number, p. 487. 

 Monsieur Boucher de Perthes was 79 years of age when he died. 



