Primitive Man in the Sonime Valley. — Uphani. 351 
It is difficult for us, at the present day of increased knowl- 
edge, to comprehend the general incredulity, prejudice, and 
reluctance, which the evidences of the great antiquity of man- 
kind met and overcame. Little attention, indeed, was granted 
to these observers until they were visited and their conclu- 
sions confirmed by English archaeologists and geologists. Fal- 
coner and Prestwich in the autumn of 1858, and Evans and 
Lyell in 1859. Their writings, with those of Lubbock and 
Alfred Tylor, also of England, Gaudry and others in France, 
and Dr. Edmund Andrews, of Chicago, all examining the 
Somme gravels, loesslike loam, and peat, during the decade 
of 1858 to 1867, established beyond question a human anti- 
quity far earlier than the beginnings of written history and 
contemporaneous with great climatic and geographical 
changes in Europe. Only within recent years, however, since 
the origin of the glacial drift through the agency of land ice- 
sheets, and the late termination of the Glacial period, no 
more than 10,000 to 5,000 years ago, have come to be gen- 
erally recognized, are we enabled with confidence to correl- 
ate that prolonged time of fluctuating glaciation of the north- 
ern lands on both sides of the Atlantic with the Palaeolithic 
period, represented by the Somme gravels, by the similar 
implement-bearing deposits of many other valleys in France, 
Belgium, and southern Britain, and by the reindeer-hunting 
cave-dwellers in those countries. 
In this paper, based on my examination of the Somme 
valley, the Palaeolithic and Glacial periods are shown to have 
been nearly coextensive in duration. But a ruder and earlier 
stage of stone-working, which is named the Eolithic period, 
had preceded the Ice age, as is shown by the yet more prim- 
itive and geologically older flint implements found by ?Iar- 
rison and Prestwich on the upland plateaus of Kent and ad- 
joining counties in .southeastern England. Kent lies 50 to 
100 miles northwest from the mouth of the Somme, and ap- 
parently had a land connection with France in preglacial 
times across the present strait of Dover, so that doubtless 
Eolithic men had likewise lived in the Somme region during 
that Late Pliocene or Early Pleistocene time, long before the 
maximum extension of the European ice-sheet. When the 
Glacial period was waning, the latest Palaeolithic men of 
