238 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



rOEEIGN INTELLIGENCE. 



Eartliquate sliocks were felt at Dijon on the 17tli and 18tli of April last. 



Professor Lecoq, of Clermont-Ferrand, lias presented to the French 

 Academy of Sciences his magnificent geological map of the Puy-de-D6me, 

 on which he has laboured so many years. 



The Society of Agriculture, Science, and Art, of Poligny (Jura), have 

 announced that they will meet on the 22nd June and hold a sort of Con- 

 gress, to which the French geologists and palaeontologists are invited. 

 The railway works at the foot of the Jura have traversed, near the village 

 of St. Lothaire, a tertiary basin which, upon a liassic basement, supports a 

 moraine exhibiting all the usual characteristics, and which, in its turn, is 

 covered by a turf deposit containing bones of JShphas jprimigenius, deer, 

 rhinoceros, etc. In the Lias shales near by, important remains of enor- 

 mous saurians have been met with ; and the Poligny Society consider it 

 will be very interesting for the French savants to visit these interesting 

 cuttings before the completion of the works renders their investigation diffi- 

 cult or impossible. 



Undoubtedly geologists at the present time are trenching, in their in- 

 vestigations, on the domains of the archseologist and historian ; and it is diffi- 

 cult to see how, in the present exciting investigations on the antiquity of 

 man, such trespasses are to be avoided. Many are accidental, many are 

 designed ; but without keeping their eyes well open, to the doings of the 

 antiquary especially, geologists cannot arrive at proper conclusions. This 

 necessity must be our excuse now, as well as on many other occasions both 

 past and future, for including in our pages notices of subjects not strictly 

 geological. How can it be otherwise ? We have traces in the Drift of 

 human relics ; the same in peat-beds and alluvial deposits of very great 

 antiquity ; and antiquaries, as a rule, have hitherto had no idea of going 

 beyond the Celtic epoch. The oldest monuments, therefore, of man's exist- 

 ence in our own and neighbouring lands are usually assigned, with no other 

 warranty than their antiquity, to that race. The recorded circumstances 

 under which such early relics are found are not, however, always satisfying 

 to the geologist of the correctcess of these assignments. Such is the case with 

 the so-called Celtic boat lately found in a fluviatile deposit during some en- 

 gineering works on the Upper Ehine at Cordon. This boat is formed of a 

 single trunk of a tree, hollowed out like the canoes of savages. It measures 

 about eight or nine yards long by about two yards in breadth. The wood 

 of which it is composed is said to be " completely petrified or fossil ;" and 

 its place of embedment in the earth is stated as being " under a bed of 

 sand and gravel." The local antiquaries naturally attribute this interest- 

 ing relic to thc Allobroges, a people of Transalpine Gaul, that in the time 

 of CcTsar inhabited this part of Koman Provence — and which supposition 

 may be right, if the " sand and gravel" mentioned be merely recent river- 

 drift. But are not the circumstances worthy of the scrutiny of geologists ? 

 AVc have certainly pcmmi in tlie gravel at Ashford (in Xent), at Bedford, 

 near Ilerne B;iy, ami other places, seams of dark coaly bits of wood which 

 might be the debris of ]ii]os, huts, or boats of the men of the flint-implement 

 age. Such woody seams should be searched ; and whenever ancient canoes, 

 and other such decisive relics, are found in or under gravel, we think it is 

 the duty of geologists to satisfy themselves and the world of what age such 

 gi-avel IS. S. j. M. 



