﻿lxii PBOCEELINGS OP THJE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



associated with the implements having been washed into the gravel 

 from an older deposit ; for not only are they little if at all worn, hut 

 in the lower beds at Menchecourt, near Abbeville, the skeleton of a 

 Rhinoceros was discovered nearly entire ; and thus we have strong, 

 almost conclusive, evidence of the coexistence of Man with these 

 extinct Mammalia ; — that it appears to be established beyond a doubt 

 that, in a period of antiquity remote beyond any of which we have 

 hitherto found traces, this portion of the globe was peopled by Man ; 

 — that, at Amiens, land which is now 160 feet above the sea, and 

 90 feet above the Somme, has, since the existence of Man, been sub- 

 merged under fresh water, and an aqueous deposit from 20 feet to 

 30 feet in thickness, a portion of which at all events must have sub- 

 sided from tranquil water, has been formed upon it ; and that this 

 too has taken place in a country the level of which is now stationary, 

 and the face of which has been little altered since the days when 

 the Gauls and the Eomans constructed their sepulchres in the soil 

 overlying the drift which contains these remains of a far earlier race 

 of men. 



At a meeting of the Geological Society of France last April, at 

 which I was present, M. de Vibraye read an account of explorations 

 he had made in a cavern of jurassic rock near Arcy, in the Departe- 

 ment de l'Aube, between Troyes and Chalons -sur-Marne, which paper 

 has since been printed in the ' Bulletin ' of that Society. This cavern 

 contains three distinct beds of drift, the two uppermost bearing evi- 

 dence of remaniement ; but the lowest he is satisfied must be an un- 

 disturbed mass of materials washed into the cavern by the same force 

 which spread the pleistocene drift, characterized by the remains of 

 Rhinoceros tichorhinus, Ursus spelceus, and Hycena sjielcea, over the 

 north-west of France. On making excavations in this lowest bed, 

 he met with a vast accumulation of the bones of the above animals ; 

 and among them, one of the labourers, while M. Vibraye was in the 

 cavern, found a human jaw. M. Vibraye thus describes this re- 

 markable event : — " Judge, gentlemen, of my surprise, when I saw 

 a human jaw. I felt disposed to doubt the reality, and to believe 

 that it was the jaw of an ape ; but no, the doubt could not remain 

 for an instant; for the jaw, all the alveoli of which are perfectly 

 seen, still contained two well-characterized teeth, viz. the first right 

 lower premolar and the first large molar of the same side. I hastened 

 to satisfy myself not only as to the situation, but as to the actual 

 place this important remain had occupied, and I can affirm that the 

 homogeneous bed, the lowest bed in the cavern, was perfectly intact, 

 and had in no respect changed its nature. I found this jaw while 

 devoid of all preconceived ideas, and was even obliged to do violence 

 to my individual convictions to admit the evidence. To add to the 

 value of this discovery, I ought to add that, while arranging the 

 numerous remains collected in this cavern during the last two years, 

 I found the tooth of another man, a first premolar of the lower jaw 

 belonging to an individual of less size than he to whom the jaw 

 belonged. This would tend to prove that the first discovery is not 

 an isolated fact, and that it is more than probable that further con- 



