﻿ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. 



Ixv 



part of it at St. Acheul consists of a bed of flint-gravel from 6 feet to 

 12 feet thick, resting on chalk. It was in this gravel that the 

 worked flints were found, and in the lowest part near the chalk. It 

 has been alleged that the gravel in this place is a case of what the 

 French call a remaniement, that is, an accumulation of the diluvial 

 gravel that had been disturbed by a local flood, or by man, which 

 involved in it the works of art belonging to a comparatively recent 

 time. But no evidence of this has been brought forward, and it has 

 been distinctly denied by M. Gaudry and Mr. Evans in the papers 

 quoted above. Other experienced geologists who have examined the 

 localities, both at Amiens and Abbeville, entertain no doubt that it 

 is an undisturbed deposit. I visited St. Acheul last April, and am 

 surprised that any one could see the least sign of a remaniement. 



Another and a very decisive proof of the coexistence of Man with 

 extinct species of quadrupeds has been brought forward by M. Lartet, 

 a Foreign Member of our Society, in a paper read before us last May, 

 as well as in a communication in the same month to the Geological 

 Society of France. He there points out numerous instances of inten- 

 tional incisions by a sharp but rude instrument in such bones. These 

 incisions exist when the bones are disinterred ; and if the bones un- 

 questionably belong to extinct species, and if the deposit in which 

 they are found is certainly undisturbed ground, the evidence is com- 

 plete. All these conditions are fulfilled in the cases brought forward 

 by M. Lartet. He exhibited the specimens to myself in the Museum 

 of the Jardin des Plantes at Paris last spring. 



To assign any approximate date for the age when the people who 

 formed these flint implements existed is impossible, in the present 

 state of our knowledge. But M. Lartet, who is not more distin- 

 guished by his palseontologieal knowledge than by habitual caution, 

 has not hesitated to express his belief on this subject in the following 

 terms in the paper in our Quarterly Journal I have already referred 

 to : — " M. d'Archiac has been led, by a series of well-weighed induc- 

 tions from stratigraphical considerations, to consider the epoch of the 

 separation of the British Islands from France as occurring after the 

 deposition of the diluvial rolled pebbles, and before that of the ancient 

 alluvium, the Loess of the north of France, of Belgium, the valley 

 of the Bhine, &c. The inference to be drawn from that hypothesis is 

 self-evident: it is this, that the primitive people to whom we attri- 

 bute the hatchets and other worked flints of Amiens and Abbeville 

 might have eomnmnicated with the existing country of England by 

 dry land, inasmuch as the separation did not take place until after 

 the deposit of the rolled diluvial pebbles, from among which the 

 hatchets and worked flints have been collected." 



Every geologist must be of the opinion of M. d'Archiac, that the 

 lands of England and France were once united — and that at no very 

 distant period in geological time, from community of structm'e and 

 from the occurrence of the remains of extinct species of quadrupeds 

 in England which could only have come to us over continuous land. 

 Mr. Evans, in the memoir above cited, states that the gravel at 

 St. Acheul closely resembles that on some parts of the Sussex coast, 

 and that the beds at the Moulin Quignon, near Abbeville, are nearly 



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