308 RECAPITULATION. 



Yet though, the former belong to the Stone age, to a time so 

 remote that the use of metal was apparently still unknown 

 in Western Europe, they are separated from the earlier 

 weapons of the upper-level drift by the whole period neces- 

 sary for the excavation of the Somme Valley, to a depth of 

 more than one hundred feet. 



If, therefore, we get no definite date for the arrival of 

 man in these countries, we can at least form a vivid idea of 

 his antiquity. He must have seen the Somme running at a 

 height of about a hundred feet above its present level. 

 It is, indeed, probable that he dates back in Northern France 

 almost, if not quite, as far as the rivers themselves. The 

 fauna of the country must have been indeed unlike what it is 

 now. Along the banks of the rivers ranged a savage race 

 of hunters and fishermen, and in the forests wandered the 

 mammoth, the two-horned woolly rhinoceros, a species of 

 tiger, the musk ox, the reindeer, and the urns. 



Yet the geography of France cannot have been very 

 different from what it is at present. The present rivers ran 

 in their present directions, and the sea even then lay between 

 the Somme and the Adur, though the channel was not so 

 wide as it is at present. 



Gradually the river deepened its valley ; ineffective, or 

 even perhaps constructive, in autumn and winter, the melt- 

 ing of the snows turned it every spring into a roaring 

 torrent. These floods were probably more destructive to 

 animals even than man himself ; while, however rude they 

 may have been, our predecessors can hardly be supposed to 

 have been incapable of foreseeing and consequently escaping 

 the danger. While the water, at an elevation of one 

 hundred and fifty feet above its present level, as for instance 

 at Liercourt, had sufficient force to deposit coarse gravel ; at 

 a still higher level it would part with finer particles, and 

 would thus form the loess which, at the same time, would 



