1864.] 



Proceedings of the Asiatic Society, 



575 



Somme Valley had been hollowed out in a period of six thousand 

 years, or even six thousand years two or three times multiplied, would 

 be utterly at variance with all that we know of the eroding action of 

 rivers ; and the Somme Valley only offered one instance out of a great 

 number in which broad river valleys must have been formed since man 

 lived on the earth. Some persons without practical acquaintance with 

 the forms of stones naturally fractured, had doubted whether the flint 

 implements were really of human manufacture, in spite of all the 

 evidence of design afforded by their uniformity, and the number of 

 fractures by which that unformity had been attained ; and the absence 

 of human bones from the deposits containing the flint implements had 

 been much commented on, as being adverse to the view of the human 

 origin of the flint knives. It might be satisfactory, therefore, to such 

 persons to know, that within the last few months a considerable 

 number of human bones, including a human skull of very depressed 

 form, a sacrum, portions of jaws and other bones, ^iad been disinterred 

 from the old flint-knife gravels of Moulin Quignon, not by the 

 questionable agency of workmen, but by M. Boucher cles Perthes and 

 a number of French G-eologists, whose names were a sufficient guaran- 

 tee for the genuineness of the discovery. Mr. Blanford concluded 

 by reading a paragraph from the August number of the Annals and 

 Magazine of Natural History, which gave an account of these dis- 

 coveries. 



Mr. Blanford then drew the attention of the Meeting to some 

 portions of a semi-fossil human skull, found some years since, unlabelled 

 and without any note of locality, in the Society's Museum. It consist- 

 ed of the occipital and parietal bones and a portion of the frontal, 

 with portions of upper and lower jaws, and was filled with a mass of 

 shells of the genus Unio, also semifossilizecl, and loosely connected 

 together by calcareous infiltration, in a sandy matrix. The Unio was 

 of a living species, but that fact would afford no indication of age, as 

 the fresh water shells which accompany the bones of extinct Mam- 

 malia in the Nerbudda alluvium are all of living species. Mr. W. 

 Theobald had found this specimen some years ago in the Museum 

 shortly after his return from the Nerbudda Valley, and then stated 

 that the matrix of the specimen resembled that of certain of the 

 Nerbudda bone deposits. The specimen had been laid by, and had 



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