AND HIS COTEMPORAKIES. 597 



primigenius, which he had exhumed with his own hands 

 deep in that section, along with flint- weapons, presenting the 

 same character as some of those found in the Brixham Cave, 

 I arrived at the conviction that they were of contempora- 

 neous 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. The results of my 

 impressions were communicated to Mr. Prestwich, in a letter 

 dated Abbeville, November 1858, of which the following is a 

 transcript : — 



[Copy.] 



Abbeville, Nov. 1, 1858. 



My dear Prestwich, — As the weather continued fine, I came on 

 here to see Boucher de Perthes' collection. I advised him of my 

 intention from London, and my note luckily found him in the neigh- 

 bourhood. He good-naturedly came in to receive me, and I have 

 been richly rewarded. His collection of wrought flint-implements, and 

 of the objects of every description associated with them, far exceeds 

 anything I expected to have seen, especially from a single locality. He 

 has made great additions, since the publication of his first volume, in 

 the second, which I have no.w by me. He showed me ' flint ' hatchets 

 which he had dug up with his own hands mixed indiscriminately with 

 the molars of Elephas primigenius. I examined and identified plates of 

 the molars and the flint-objects which were got along with them. 

 Abbeville is an out-of-the-way place, very little visited, and the French 

 savants who meet him in Paris laugh at Monsieur de Perthes and his 

 researches. But after devoting the greater part of a day to his vast 

 collection, I am perfectly satisfied that there is a great deal of fair pre- 

 sumptive evidence in favour of many of his speculations regarding the 

 remote antiquity of these industrial objects, and their association with 

 animals now extinct. M. Boucher's hotel is, from ground-floor to 

 garret, a continued museum filled with pictures, mediaeval art, and 

 Gaulish antiquities, including antediluvian flint-knives, fossil-bones, &c. 

 If, during next summer, you should happen to be paying a visit to 

 France, let me strongly recommend you to come to Abbeville. I am 

 sure you would be richly rewarded. You are the only English geolo- 

 gist I know who would go into the subject con amore. I am satisfied 

 that English geologists are much behind the indications of the materials 

 now in existence relative to this walk of Post- Glacial geology, and you 

 are the man to bring up the lee-way. 



I saw no flint specimens in his collection so completely whitened 

 through and through, as our flint-knives (i.e. from the Brixham Cave), 

 and nothing resembling the mysterious hatchet which I made up of the 

 two pieces. What I have seen gives me still greater impulse to per- 

 severe in our Brixham explorations. — Yours very truly, 



t i t» 4. • i v H. Falconer. 



Joseph Prestwich, Esq. 



The interest excited by this note was further stimulated 

 by the accounts which reached England, in April 1859, of 

 the results of the ' Maccagnone ' exploration ; and Mr. 



