Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/113

Rh therefore, were laid open, from twenty to thirty-five feet in depth, and the bones of quadrupeds of the genera elephant, rhinoceros, bear, hyæna, stag, ox, horse, and others, were found, and had been sent from time to time to Paris to be examined and named by Cuvier, who described them in his 'Ossements Fossiles.' A correct account of the associated flint tools and of their position was given in 1847 by M. Boucher de Perthes in his work above cited, and they were stated to occur at various depths, often twenty or thirty feet from the surface, in sand and gravel, especially in those strata which were nearly in contact with the subjacent white chalk. But the scientific world had no faith in the statement that works of art, however rude, had been met with in undisturbed beds of such antiquity. Few geologists visited Abbeville in winter, when the sand-pits were open, and when they might have opportunities of verifying the sections, and judging whether the instruments had really been embedded by natural causes in the same strata with the bones of the mammoth, rhinoceros, and other extinct mammalia. Some of the tools figured in the 'Antiquités Celtiques' were so rudely shaped, that many imagined them to have owed their peculiar forms to accidental fracture in a river's bed; others suspected frauds on the part of the workmen, who might have fabricated them for sale, or that the gravel had been disturbed, and that the worked flints had got mingled with the bones of the mammoth long after that animal and its associates had disappeared from the earth.

No one was more sceptical than the late eminent physician of Amiens, Dr. Rigollot, who had long before (in the year 1819) written a memoir on the fossil mammalia of the valley of the Somme. He was at length induced to visit Abbeville, and, having inspected the collection of M. Boucher de Perthes, returned home resolved to look for himself for flint tools in the gravel-pits near Amiens. There, accordingly, at