598 PRIMEVAL MAN, 



Prestwich, joined by Mr. John Evans, proceeded to Abbeville 

 during the Easter recess, at the end of the same month. 

 The evidence yielded by the Valley of the Somme was gone 

 into with the scrupulous care and severe and exhaustive 

 analysis which are characteristic of Mr. Prestwich's re- 

 searches. The conclusions to which he was conducted were 

 communicated to the Royal Society on the 12th May, 1859, 

 in his celebrated memoir, read on the 26th May, and pub- 

 lished in the ' Philosophical Transactions ' of 1860, which, 

 in addition to researches made in the Valley of the Somme, 

 contained an account of similar phenomena presented by the 

 Valley of the Waveney, near Hoxne, in Suffolk. Mr. Evans 

 communicated to the Society of Antiquaries a memoir on 

 the character and geological position of the ' Flint Imple- 

 ments in the Drift,' which appeared in the ' Archseologia' for 

 1860. The results arrived at by Mr. Prestwich were ex- 

 pressed as follows : — 



'1st. That the flint-implements are the result of design 

 and the work of man. 



' 2ndly. That they are found in beds of gravel, sand, and 

 clay, which have never been artificially disturbed. 



' 3rdly. That they occur associated with the remains of 

 land, freshwater, and marine Testacea, of species now living, 

 and most of them still common in the same neighbourhood, 

 and also with the remains of various Mammalia— a few of 

 species now living, but more of extinct forms. 



' 4thly. That the period at which their entombment took 

 place was subsequent to the Boulder-clay period, and to that 

 extent Post-Glacial ; and also that it was among the latest 

 in geological time — one apparently immediately anterior to 

 the surface assuming its present form, so far as it regards 

 some of the minor features.' 



The Emopean reputation of Mr. Prestwich stamped these 

 conclusions as well-weighed and established facts in science. 

 What has since followed has been the confirmation of the 

 results successively arrived at by Boucher de Perthes, 

 Rigollot, and Prestwich, the last having relieved them from 

 the trammels of Diluvian agency. Geologists, French, Eng- 

 lish, and Continental generally flocked to Amiens and Abbe- 

 ville, some for a time maintaining cautious doubts, but the 

 great majority convinced by the evidence. The case was 

 fully proved, when some eminent British geologists tendered 

 their acceptance of the geological evidence of the antiquity 

 of man, derived from his embedded works : Sir Charles Lyell, 

 at the Aberdeen meeting of the British Association in Sept. 

 1859 ; followed a year later by Sir Roderick Murchison at the 

 meeting of the same body held at Oxford in Sept. 1860. The 

 publie mind, led in its convictions by the favoured few whom 



