248 



PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



deposits in Kent's Hole, near Torquay, had lain un- 

 heeded for some years save as " curios," when M. 

 Boucher des Perthes saw in the worked flints of a 

 somewhat rougher type which he found mingled with 

 the bones of rhinoceroses, cave-bears, mammoths, or 

 woolly-haired elephants, and other mammals in the 

 " drift " or gravel-pits of Abbeville, in Picardy, the 

 proofs of man's primitive savagery, so far as Western 

 Europe was concerned. The presence of these 

 rudely-chipped flints had been noticed by M. de 

 Perthes in 1839, but he could not persuade savants 

 to admit that human hands had shaped them, until 

 these doubting Thomases saw for themselves like 

 implements in situ at a depth of seventeen feet from 

 the original surface of the ground. That was in 

 1858: a year before the publication of the Origin of 

 Species. Similar materials have been unearthed 

 from every part of the globe habitable once or in- 

 habited now. They confirm the speculations of Lu- 

 cretius as to a universal makeshift with stone, bone, 

 horn, and such-like accessible or pliable substances 

 during the ages that preceded the discovery of 

 metals. Therefore, the existence of a Stone Age at 

 one period or another where now an Age of Iron 

 (following an Age of Bronze) prevails, is an estab- 

 lished canon of archaeological science. From this 

 follows the inference that man's primitive condition 

 was that which corresponds to the lowest type ex- 

 tant, the Australian and Papuan; that the further 

 back inquiry is pushed such culture as exists is found 



