365 
under similar conditions, and the fact communicated to the public 
in an archseological journal by the discoverer Mr Frere. The 
spot has been since visited by Mr Prestwich, fresh from the Abbe- 
ville beds, and he recognises the same phenomena. But this is not 
all. The scent, once taken up, is becoming stronger and stronger, 
every day. Closely connected with the period of the drift-gravels 
are the ossiferous caves and caverns so common all over Europe 
where limestones prevail. They have been long known to contain a 
profusion of bones of the extinct as well as of living mammalia. 
Here, again, it is now confidently asserted that human implements 
are being found under conditions which leave no doubt that, whether 
man was or was not contemporary with these animals, he must at 
least have preceded the action of those agencies which brought the 
bones together. The evidence in this case must necessarilv be 
more liable to erroneous interpretation than in the case of imple- 
ments found in undisturbed beds of gravel, because caverns must at 
all times have been a resort of savage tribes whenever the entrances 
were accessible from the surface. But the evidence seems to be 
such as is sufficient to convince examiners so careful and acute as 
Dr Falconer and Mr Prestwich of the undoubted priority of man 
to that diluvial action which appears to have swept into those 
caverns their mixed contents. But this is not all. It is now re- 
called to mind, that so long ago as 1833, a M. Schmerling had pub- 
lished Researches into the Ossiferous Caverns of Belgium, in which, 
not implements of man only, but his teeth and his bones, and 
portions of his skull, had been found so thoroughly mixed up with 
the remains of the lower mammalia, as to leave in his mind no 
doubt, if not of their contemporaneous life, at least of their con- 
temporaneous entombment in the spots where they are now found. 
These are remarkable facts ; and in so far as they indicate that the 
phenomena of Abbeville are closely related to others observed in 
many different parts of Europe, they go far to prove that the French 
gravel-beds were due to no mere local cause, but to some diluvial 
action which was general, and therefore in all probability due in 
great part to the waters of the sea. 
I need not point out how many and how interesting are the 
questions which this discovery raises in our minds. Was this in- 
cursion of the waters of the sea, over a pre-existing land, sudden 
and transient, or gradual, and of long duration ? In the Abbeville 
VOL. IV. 3 c 
