116 DISCOVERIES AT AMIENS. [Ch. X. 



and selected by man as places both of domicile and of sepulture, 

 while suites of caverns have also served as the channels through which 

 underground rivers have flowed ; so that the remains of living beings 

 which peopled the district at more than one era may, at a later date, 

 have been mingled and confounded together in one and the same 

 deposit. But in 1847, M. Boucher de Perthes observed in an ancient 

 alluvium at Abbeville, in Picardy, the bones of extinct mammalia 

 associated in such a manner with flint implements of a rude type as 

 to lead him to infer that both the organic remains and the works of 

 art were referable to one and the same period. This inference, 

 though questioned for a time, was soon confirmed by fresh observa- 

 tions made by Dr. Rigollot, at Amiens, and all doubts were finally 

 cleared up in 1859, by Mr. Prestwich, who found a flint tool in situ 

 in the same stratum at Amiens, that contained the remains of extinct 

 mammalia. Geologists were, moreover, better prepared to accept 

 such proofs of the coexistence of man with the ancient fauna in conse- 

 quence of the more exact data obtained from the exploration of the 

 Brixham cave in 1860, to be mentioned in the sequel. 



The flint implements found at Abbeville and Amiens are most of 

 them considered to be hatchets and spear-heads, and are different 

 from those commonly called " Celts." These celts, so ofted found in 

 the recent formations, have a more regular oblong shape, the result of 

 grinding, by which also a sharp edge has been given to them. The 

 Abbeville tools found in gravel at different levels, as in Nos. 3 and 4, 

 fig. 106, in which the bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, and other 

 extinct mammalia occur, are always unground, having evidently been 

 brought into their present form simply by the chipping off of fragments 

 of flint by repeated blows, such as could be given by a stone ham- 

 mer. 



Some of them are oval, others of a spear-headed form, no two 

 exactly alike, and yet the greater number of each kind are obviously 

 fashioned after the same general pattern. Their outer surface is often 

 white, the original black flint having been discolored and bleached by 

 exposure to the air, or by the action of acids, as they lay -in the 

 gravel. They are most commonly stained of the same ochreous 

 color as the flints of the gravel in which they are embedded. Occa- 

 sionally their antiquity is indicated not only by their color but by 

 superficial incrustations of carbonate of lime, or by dendrites formed 

 of oxide of iron and manganese. The edges also of most of them 

 are worn, either by having been used as tools, or by having been rolled 

 in the river's bed. They are usually found at depths of from 15 to 25 

 feet from the surface, in gravel, covered by loam, and most of them 

 near the bottom of the gravel, and not far from its contact with the 

 subjacent chalk. They are met with not only in the lower-level gravels, 

 as in No. 3, fig. 106, but also in No. 4, or the higher gravels, as at 

 St. Acheul, in the suburbs of Amiens, where the old alluvium lies at an 

 elevation of about 100 feet above the level of the river Somme. At 



