Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/360

344 made comparatively more rapid progress than either. Not more than fourteen years have passed since the discoveries made by Boucher de Perthes of flint implements in the gravel-beds of Abbeville and Amiens, although at that time discredited and disparaged by the geologists



of his own country, were confirmed and supplemented by Mr. Prestwich and Mr. Evans. Previously to that time these objects had attracted but little notice; the things were "neither rich nor rare;" men looked at them and wondered, and then forgot them, just as before William Smith's time they gazed with a profitless curiosity on