Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/112

94 of the antiquity of our race to the dark recesses of underground vaults and tunnels, which may have served as places of refuge or sepulture to a succession of human beings and wild animals, and where floods may have confounded together in one breccia the memorials of the fauna of more than one epoch? Why do we not meet with a similar assemblage of the relics of man, and of living and extinct quadrupeds, in places where the strata can be thoroughly scrutinised in the light of day?

Recent researches have at length demonstrated that such memorials, so long sought for in vain, do in fact exist, and their recognition is the chief cause of the more favourable reception now given to the conclusions which MM. Tournal, Christol, Schmerling, and others, arrived at thirty years ago respecting the fossil contents of caverns.

The first great step in this new direction was made thirteen years after the publication of Schmerling's 'Researches,' by M. Boucher de Perthes, who found in ancient alluvium at Abbeville, in Picardy, some flint implements, the relative antiquity of which was attested by their geological position. The antiquarian knowledge of their discoverer enabled him to recognise in their rude and peculiar type a character distinct from that of the polished stone weapons of a later period, usually called 'celts.' In the first volume of his 'Antiquités Celtiques,' published in 1847, M. Boucher de Perthes styled these older tools 'antediluvian,' because they came from the lowest beds of a series of ancient alluvial strata bordering the valley of the Somme, which geologists had termed 'diluvium.' He had begun to collect these implements in 1841, from which time they had been dug out of the drift or deposits of gravel and sand whenever excavations were made in repairing the fortifications of Abbeville; or annually, as often as flints were wanted for the roads, or loam for making bricks. Fine sections,