Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/169

Rh to a foot or more in diameter. These blocks are peculiarly abundant in the lower drift commonly called the 'diluvium

The granitic materials are traceable to a chain of hills called the Morvan, where the head waters of the Yonne take their rise, 150 miles to the SSE. of Paris.

It was in this lowest gravel that M. H. T. Grosse, of Geneva, found, in April 1860, in the suburbs of Paris, at La Motte Piquet, on the left bank of the Seine, one or two well-formed flint implements of the Amiens type, accompanied by a great number of ruder tools or attempts at tools. I visited the spot in 1861 with M. Hébert, and saw the stratum from which the worked flints had been extracted, twenty feet below the surface, and near the bottom of the 'grey diluvium,' a bed of gravel from which I have myself, in and near Paris, frequently collected the bones of the elephant, horse, and other mammalia.

More recently, M. Lartet has discovered at Clichy, in the environs of Paris, in the same lower gravel, a well-shaped flint implement of the Amiens type, together with remains both of Elephas primigenius and E. antiquus. No tools have yet been met with in any of the gravel occurring at the higher levels of the valley of the Seine; but no importance can be attached to this negative fact, as so little search has yet been made for them.

Mr. Prestwich has observed contortions indicative of ice-action, of the same kind as those near Amiens (see p. 138), in the higher level drift at Charonne, near Paris; but as yet no similar derangement has been seen in the lower gravels—a fact, so far as it goes, in unison with the phenomena observed in Picardy.

In the cavern of Arcy-sur-Yonne a series of deposits have lately been investigated by the Marquis de Vibraye, who discovered human bones in the lowest of them, mixed with remains of quadrupeds of extinct and recent species. This