264 LECTURE X. 



a whole collection of tliese articles and exiiibited them in the 

 Museum, where the fraud was detected by some more acute 

 observers. This fraud, however, as little invalidates the 

 genuineness of the first articles found, as the fabrication of old 

 pictures, statues, and mosaics, which is now so successfully car- 

 ried on in Italy, can diminish the value of the genuine original 

 antiquities. 



Let us return to our subject. The volcanoes of Auvergne 

 and the Rhine, which in prehistoric times vomited forth mighty 

 streams of lava and ashes, have become extinct since the time 

 of the mammoth, cave bear, and the reindeer. The volcanic 

 tuff, enclosing the above-named animals, is contemporaneous 

 with the deposit in the caves. The fossil man of Denise is, 

 however, as far as we know, the only human relic found in this tuff. 



In the diluvium of France and England, on the other hand, 

 have been found so many stone and bone implements, that they 

 deserve our attention, as their discovery has given the first 

 impulse to researches in this new direction. We may, how- 

 ever, observe at once that, excepting one lower jaw, the anti- 

 quity of which is still contested, no human fossil bones have 

 been found in the diluvium, but only implements, so that the 

 race question remains unsolved. It is just possible that some 

 old graves, such as those discovered in Mecklenburg, of which 

 miore hereafter, belong to that period ; but the contemporaneity 

 is far from being established, and further researches are needed. 



In the North of France, especially in Picardy, the soil is 

 chiefly composed of white chalk, containing in its horizontal 

 strata regular layers of flints. In former times, when flints, 

 alike for purposes of peace and war, possessed a high value, 

 which they retained until the invention of lucifers and percus- 

 sion caps, there were in Picardy and the Champagne large flint 

 manufactories which procured their material from the subsoil. 

 We shall see that this manufacture of flint implements dates 

 from the remotest antiquity. 



This chalk formation was, no doubt, at a former period 

 Qovered by tertiary formations, thus forming an almost uniform 

 plateau which gradually thinned off towards the sea. These 

 tertiary formations were mostly of a sandy nature, and thus it 



