INTRODUCTORY. 3 



configuration and outline of the land which have taken place 

 within the human era, that geologists have been led to assign a 

 far higher antiquity to man's first appearance than the old 

 chronologies would allow. 



When the announcement was made some years ago that 

 rude stone implements of undoubted human workmanship had 

 been discovered in certain alluvial deposits in the valley of 

 the river Somme, under circumstances which argued for the 

 human race a very great antiquity, geologists generally received 

 the news with incredulity. That the advent of man was an 

 occurrence merely of yesterday, as it were, and a matter to be 

 discussed properly by chronologists and historians alone, most 

 of us until lately were taught to believe. So ingrained, indeed, 

 had this belief become, that although evidence of the antiquity 

 of our race similar to those subsequent French discoveries, which 

 succeeded at last in routing the sceptical indifference of geologists, 

 had been noted from time to time in England, and especially 

 by Schmerling in Belgium, yet it was only noted to be explained 

 away, and in point of fact was persistently neglected as of no 

 importance. 



Doubt had been cast upon the conclusions drawn from 

 certain evidence supplied by the English caves, and it was not 

 till 1858, when Brixham Cave was explored under the auspices 

 of the Boyal and Geological Societies of London, that English 

 geologists abandoned their preconceived notions as to the 

 improbability of man and many extinct mammals having co- 

 existed in Britain. Meanwhile, M. Boucher de Perthes, a 

 zealous and enthusiastic French antiquarian, had been insisting 

 for more than twenty years upon his discovery of " antediluvian " 

 human implements and mammalian remains in undisturbed 

 natural accumulations of loam, sand, and gravel near Abbeville. 

 But all his insistence had been in vain — his fellow-countrymen 

 paid little or no regard to his tale of wonder. It was not till 

 1859 that attention was at last directed to the enthusiastic 

 Frenchman's discoveries by Dr. Falconer, and later on by Mr. 

 Prestwich, Mr. Evans, Sir C. Lyell, Sir J. Lubbock, and other 



