PBOCEEDINGS OF GEOLOGICAL SOCIETIES. 



187 



Royal Institution. — February 26. — The Friday evening lecture was 

 " On the Quaternary Flint Implements of Abbeville, Amiens, Hoxne, etc., 

 their Geological Position and History." By Joseph Prestwich, F.R.S. 

 — Mr. Prestwich remarked upon the imputation of rashness, and even of 

 credulity, which discoveries such as that of the flint implements often en- 

 tailed upon geologists. He contended that geologists were, on the con- 

 trary, generally disposed to be incredulous. At one time they believed 

 that fishes were no older than the Carboniferous strata ; that reptiles first 

 appeared during the Liassic period; and that mammalia could not be 

 traced beyond the Tertiary strata ; and it was a long time before they were 

 satisfied that fishes go back to the Silurian, reptiles to the Carboniferous,* 

 and mammalia to the Triassic period. And so with man. Ten years ago 

 there was scarcely a geologist in this country who would not have deemed 

 the occurrence of the works of man in any beds older than the recent al- 

 luvium impossible. The discoveries made by Tournal and Chris fcol in the 

 south of France, thirty years since, of the remains of man associated with 

 those of extinct mammalia, were rejected by geologists unanimously ; nor 

 were the analogous discoveries of Schmerling m Belgium more favourably 

 received ; whilst Frere's remarkable notice, so far back as 1797, of the dis- 

 covery, at Hoxne, in Suffolk, of flint weapons mixed up with the bones of 

 large extinct animals, was allowed to lie dormant for sixty years. 



Even so late as 1855, a communication by the Torquay Natural History 

 Society, respecting the occurrence of worked flints with the fossil bones in 

 Kent's Cave, — a fact already, years before, noticed by the Eev. Mr. 

 M'Enery and by Mr. Godwin-Austen, — was deemed, by the Geological 

 Society, too improbable for publication. 



Mr. Prestwich doubted whether, prior to 1858 and 1859, there were 

 twenty men of science in Europe who would have admitted the possibility 

 of the contemporaneity of man and of the extinct mammalia. He in- 

 stanced Dr. Grant as one of the small number who, on abstract principles, 

 treated the question as an open one. He also noticed the tone of confi- 

 dent disbelief with which the asserted occurrence of flint implements in 

 certain geological deposits in the Somme valley was spoken of when he 

 made inquiries respecting this subject in Paris in 1856 and 1857, and 

 which for a time turned him from the inquiry. Such instances might be 

 multiplied. The speaker did not bring them forward as indicating any 

 perverse opposition, but to show how reluctant geologists were to abandon 

 the belief generally held on this subject without the clearest proofs, and 

 close and careful search on their part. Such, he remarked, is the inevit- 

 able progress of all discovery. Facts deemed contradictory to received 

 theory are often long rejected, some as clearly failing in proof, others as 

 non-proven. Evidence is hesitatingly received, and has to force its way 

 through a resisting stratum of incredulity ; but, as in the searching re- 

 sistance offered by close tissues in the separation of mercury from its 

 dross, that portion which passes through issues the brighter and purer the 

 more difficult the transit, and the stronger the pressure exercised. 



Allusion was then made to the distinguished palaeontologist, Dr. Fal- 

 coner — one man of science at least in this country with whom the convic- 

 tion that the remains of man might be traced back to periods greatly 

 antecedent to our ordinary records, had grown, during a long course of 

 years, from probabilities suggested by Eastern research, into certainty es- 

 tablished by extensive investigation among the European fossil-bone 



* Possibly to the Old lied Sandstone. 



