538 Man and the Mammoth. 



Squirrel ), Rabbits, Mice, and some other small animals. 

 With the extinct Mammals mentioned above, the works 

 of man in the state of flint weapons, &c. have of late 

 years become familiar to English geologists. For long 

 they shrunk from the idea with excessive caution, and 

 the full proof first came before them from France. 



In the year 1847, a French savant, Mons. Boucher 

 de Perthes, of Abbeville, published an account, in the 

 first volume of his ' Antiquites celtiques,' of flint 

 implements, the work of man, found in association with 

 the teeth of the Mammoth (Elephas primigenius) in 

 the old river gravels of the Somme. The strata con- 

 sisted of surface soil, below which were nearly five feet 

 of brown clay, then loam, then a little gravel containing 

 land shells, and along with these shells the teeth of the 

 Mammoth. Below that level there occurred white sand 

 and fresh-water shells, and again the bones and teeth of 

 the Mammoth and other extinct species ; and along 

 with these bones and teeth, a number of well-formed 

 flint hatchets of what we now call the palaeolithic type. 



Geologists were for long asleep on this subject. M. 

 de Perthes had printed it many years, bat none of them 

 paid much attention to him. At length, Mr. Prestwich 

 having his attention drawn to the subject, began to 

 examine the question. He visited M. de Perthes, who 

 distinctly proved to him, and afterwards to other 

 English geologists, that what he had stated was incon- 

 testably the fact. These implements are somewhat 

 rude in form, but when I say ' rude,' I do not mean 

 that there is any doubt of their having been formed 

 artificially. They are not polished and finished, like 

 those of later date in our own islands, or the modern 

 ones brought from the South Sea Islands ; but there 

 can be no doubt whatever that they were formed by 



