XXX PEOCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



vered a large number of bones wliicb proved that the cave was open in 

 prehistoric times. A full statement of the bearing of this discovery 

 upon the value of the evidence atforded by the cave, accompanied by 

 the most careful plans and sections, would have been published, had 

 not Mr. King's increasing illness forbidden work of any kind. After 

 his return to England he gradually became worse, until in 1867 he 

 resolved to winter in Algiers, and to give up his favourite pursuits 

 and deeply cherished schemes of work. Thence he travelled to 

 Switzerland, and, daily becoming weaker, he died on the 8th of July, 

 1868, at Pontresina, in the Engadine, in full possession of all his 

 faculties. 



One of Mr. King's last expressed wishes was that his collection, 

 containing all Professor Heer's type specimens of preglacial vege- 

 tation, and a large number of Dr. Falconer's type-specimens of 

 Mammals, should be presented to some museum where it might be 

 used for the advancement of the science he loved so well. Accord- 

 ingly it has found a resting-place in the Museum of Practical 

 Geology in Jermyn Street. 



Quaternary Geology has suffered additional losses among our 

 Foreign Members in M. Boucher de Perthes and M. Morlot, whose 

 names will be always honourably associated with that revival of sci- 

 entific inquiry into the antiquity of man of which this generation 

 has been witness. 



M. jAcaiTEs BoTJCHEE DE Ckeveccetjr DE pERTHEs, who died in 

 August last, was born in the year 1789, at the commencement of that 

 great era of change which divides modern France from old France. 

 He could hardly recollect the Terror ; but the Directory, the Consu- 

 late, the Empire, the Restoration, the second EepubHc, and the 

 second Empire, all had swept before him. 



Possessed of an independent fortune, of considerable and varied 

 powers and wide sympathies, M. Boucher de Perthes early resigned 

 an official appointment in order to devote the long remainder of a 

 healthy and vigorous life to travel, to literature, to archaeology, and 

 to science. His industry was exemplary, his enthusiasm boundless, 

 his imagination fully equal to all demands made upon it. Hence it 

 is no wonder that his fertile pen poured forth travels, political spe- 

 culations, and a very readable novel — that he occupied himself with 

 the past of man, and even with the future of woman. But he is 

 most widely known by the great stimulus which his * Antiquites 

 Celtiques et Antediluviennes,' published in 1849, gave to the study 

 of the evidence of the antiquity of man which is afforded by the 

 worked implements found imbedded in the same deposits with ex- 

 tinct animals. 



The geologists of his own country treated M. Boucher de Perthes's 

 work with indifference and neglect ; and no doubt popular historians 

 of science, judging after the event, will hereafter visit them with 

 reprobation for their blindness and their prejudices. But just and 

 critical students of the ' Antiquites ' will, I think, be able completely 



