Page:Natural History Review (1862).djvu/266

Rh savage had no such choice of tools; we see before us perhaps the whole contents of his workshop; and with these weapons, rude as they seem to us, he may have cut down trees, scooped them out into canoes, grubbed up roots, killed animals and enemies, cut up his food, made holes in winter through the ice, prepared firewood, built huts, and in some cases at least they may have served as slingstones. When, however, we shall have considered the physical evidence as to the alien condition of the country, and the contemporary animals, we shall better be able to form a conception of the habits of these our long lost progenitors.

For I have as yet but partly answered the second of the two questions with which we started. Even admitting that the flint hatchets are coeval with the gravel in which they occur, it remains to be shown that the bones of the extinct animals belong also to the same period. With reference indeed to two of those ordinarily quoted as belonging to this group, there may still be some little doubt. It seems very questionable whether any remains really belonging to the cave-bear have ever occurred in these beds, as will presently be mentioned, and though a few tusks of the hippopotamus have been found, yet (as this genus never occurs in the corresponding beds of Germany) it is possible that they may have been washed out of some older stratum.

But as regards the elephant and the rhinoceros the case is different. There is not the slightest reason to doubt that they really belong to this period and, in the case of the rhinoceros, we have the evidence of M. Baillon that the bones of the hind leg of a rhinoceros were found, at Menchecourt, in their relative situations, while the rest of the skeleton was discovered at a little distance. In this case, therefore, the body must have been entombed before the decay of the ligaments. Sir Cornewall Lewis, however, in his interesting and able, even if unsatisfactory work, on the Astronomy of the Ancients, argues that even if we must give an affirmative answer to the two first questions, and admit the coexistence of man in Western Europe with the mammoth and tichorine rhinoceros; still we may do this by bringing these animals down to a later period, as well as by carrying man back to an earlier one.

Fairly admitting this, let us now, therefore, turn to the physical evidence in the case, and see how far this will enable us to give any, and if so what, answer, to the third of the above questions.

In this part of the subject I shall be principally indebted for my facts to Mr. Prestwich, who has long studied the quaternary beds, and has done more than any other man to render them intelligible. In most of his conclusions I entirely concur, but I may perhaps be permitted to mention that though the following statements are given on his authority, I have verified almost the whole of them for myself, having had the advantage of visiting, with him and Mr. Evans, many localities not only in the valley of the Somme, but also along the banks of the Seine and its tributaries.