APPENDIX. 367 



Animal bones showing cuts or breaks supposed to be the 

 work of man have been found in seventeen different locali- 

 ties in Europe. They can all, however, be accounted for as 

 the result of natural movements or pressure of the soil act- 

 ing in connection with sharp substances, like fractured 

 flints, or else as having been made by the teeth of sharks, 

 whose fossil remains are found in great abundance in the 

 same formation. 



All the discoveries of flints supposed to show traces of 

 intentional chipping are pronounced to be unsatisfactory, 

 with the exception of those found in three localities — The- 

 nay (near Tours) and Puy-Courny (near Aurillac), in 

 France, and Otta, in the valley of the Tagus, in Portugal. 

 As European archaeologists at the present time are substan- 

 tially in accord with Mortillet in restricting the discussion 

 to these three places, I will follow their example. But al- 

 though Mortillet believes that flints found at all these locali- 

 ties exhibit marks of intelligent action, he will not admit 

 that they are the work of man. He attributes them to an 

 intelligent ancestor of man, whom he calls by the name of 

 anthropopithecus, or the precursor of man. Of this creat- 

 ure he distinguishes three different species, named respect- 

 ively after the discoverers of the flints in the three localities 

 just mentioned. The precursor, however, has found up to 

 this time only a very limited acceptance among men of 

 science, although a few believe in him on purely theoretical 

 grounds. The discussion generally turns upon the question 

 whether these flints were chipped intentionally or are the 

 result of natural causes ; and also upon the determination of 

 the geological age of the formations in which they are found. 



I visited Thenay, the most celebrated of these three locali- 

 ties, in 1877, and had the advantage of studying the question 

 there under the guidance of the late Abbe Bourgeois, the dis- 

 coverer of the flints, and one of the most prominent advo- 

 cates of the Tertiary man. This was the year before he died, 

 and he showed me at the time his complete collection, and 

 gave me several of the objects he had discovered. Geolo- 

 gists are agreed in assigning the deposits in which they 

 occur to the lower Miocene or middle Tertiary period, 

 which restricts the discussion to the character of the flints 



