Vol. 65.] ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. lix 



with the latter subject that his name will always be most closely 

 associated by geologists. 



The discoveries made by Boucher de Perthes, from 1841 onwards 

 and first published in 1817, were received by his countrymen with 

 incredulity, not unmixed with derision. In 1S5S Hugh Falconer 

 examined the collection which Boucher de Perthes had made at 

 Abbeville, and on his return to England he urged Joseph Prestwich 

 to visit the Valley of the Somme and to make a searching enquiry 

 into the facts. Evans and Prestwich undertook this work together : 

 they carefully studied Boucher de Perthes's specimens, examined 

 the gravels at Amiens and Abbeville, and actually saw one of the 

 ancient implements still embedded in situ. The evidence was 

 overwhelming, and they returned to England convinced that an 

 ancient race of men who had fabricated rude flint-implements had 

 inhabited Erance contemporaneously with extinct mammals, such 

 as the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros. They afterwards 

 visited Hoxne in Suffolk, where similar worked flints had been 

 found at the end of the eighteenth century by Mr. John Erere, 

 who had described them in a remarkable memoir, from which 

 it appears that he fully understood their true nature. It was 

 indeed in England that these prehistoric weapons first attracted 

 attention, and even as early as 1715 an implement of Acheulean 

 type had been figured by Messrs. Bagford & Hearnes. This was 

 described by Evans before the Society of Antiquaries, of which he 

 was a Fellow, having been elected in 1852. His paper entitled 

 ' On the Flint-Implements in the Drift, being an Account of their 

 Discovery on the Continent & in England ' was published in the 

 ' Archaeologia ' vol. xxx (1860) p. 280. Prestwich communicated 

 his results in an independent paper to the Royal Society. 



It was in the same year as Prestwich and Evans, that Gaudry 

 visited St. Acheul : he made fresh excavations on a very exten- 

 sive scale, keeping the workmen under constant observation, and 

 succeeded in obtaining nine flints, incontestably shaped by man 

 and associated with extinct mammals, in the Quaternary gravels. 

 He communicated these . results to the Academie des Sciences on 

 October 3rd, 1859. It is thus just fifty years ago since Prestwich, 

 Evans, and Gaudry succeeded in obtaining recognition for the 

 discoveries of Boucher de Perthes, and so laid the foundations of 

 a new and still rapidly increasing department of palaeontological 

 science. 



Evans threw himself heart and soul into the advancement of 



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