350 The American Geologist. December, i89s 
[Europoaii and American Glacial Geology Compared, XI.) 
PRIMITIVE MAN IN THE SOMME VALLEY. 
By Wakken Upham, St. Paul, Minn. 
Going north from Paris, we stopped next, on August i6th 
and T/th of last year, at Amiens and Abbeville in the Somme 
valley, and saw well the physical and geologic features of this 
valley along the distance of about fifty miles from Amiens to 
its mouth, at the southeast side of the expanse of shallow sea 
called the Channel, which separates France and England. 
During the past half century this valley of the river Somme 
has been more fully studied and discussed by geologists than 
Moel Tryfan, Glen Roy, or any other locality that we visited. 
Besides the geologic and archaeologic questions here especially 
considered, Amiens, the chief city of ancient Picardy, re- 
wards the tourist in its magnificent old cathedral, its good 
public library, and its museum, rich in remains of the Bronze 
age and of ancient Roman and medieval times; and Abbeville, 
a smaller but very interesting city, has the church of St. Wol- 
fram and the museum of Boucher de Perthes, occupying the 
house in which that famous archaeologist lived. 
At Abbeville and its northwestern suburb, Menchecourt, 
about sixteen miles from the river's mouth, Boucher de Per- 
thes first proved by his researches in the valley gravel de- 
posits, published in 1847 and later, that man was contem- 
poraneous with numerous species of great mammals which 
have since become extinct, as the mammoth, wooll}' rhino- 
ceros, and Irish elk, and with others which long ago ceased 
to live in France but are still found in far northern and arc- 
tic regions, as the reindeer and musk sheep, or in Africa, 
as the hippopotamus, hyaena, and lion. These discoveries led 
Dr. Rigollot, of Amiens, to search in the similar but higher 
gravel excavations close southeast of that city, at St. Acheul, 
where he found rudely chipped flint implements and bones 
of extinct animals associated together and occurring most 
frequently, as at Abbeville, in the basal part of the gravel 
and sand deposits. Rigollot published his observations in 
1854; and Boucher de Perthes issued the second volume of 
his principal work in 1857, and his final third volume in 1864, 
four vears before his death. 
