Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/307

Rh an account of his discoveries in Kent's Cavern near Torquay, and especially of human bones and implements mingled with, bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, cave bear, hyena, and other extinct animals; yet this memoir, like that of McEnery fifteen years before, found an atmosphere so unfavorable that it was not published.

But just at the middle of the nineteenth century came the beginning of a new epoch in science—an epoch when all these earlier discoveries were to be interpreted by means of investigations in a different field: for, in 1847, a man previously unknown to the world at large, Boucher de Perthes, published at Paris the first volume of his work on Celtic and Antediluvian Antiquities, and in this he showed engravings of typical flint implements and weapons, of which he had discovered thousands upon thousands in the high drift beds near Abbeville in northern France.

The significance of this discovery was great indeed—far greater than Boucher himself at first supposed. The very title of his book showed that he at first regarded these implements and weapons as having belonged to men overwhelmed at the Deluge of Noah; but it was soon seen that they were something very different from proofs of the literal exactness of Genesis: for they were found in terraces at great heights above the river Somme, and, under any possible theory having regard to the truth, must have been deposited there at a time when the river system of northern France was vastly different from anything known in the historic period. The whole discovery indicated a series of great geological changes since the time when these implements were made, requiring cycles of time compared to which the space allowed by the orthodox chronologists were as nothing.

His work was the result of over ten years of research and thought. Year after year a force of men under his direction had dug into these high-terraced gravel deposits of the river Somme, and in his book he now gave, in the first full form, the results of his labor. So far as France was concerned, he was met at first by what he calls "a conspiracy of silence," and by a contemptuous opposition among orthodox scientists, at the head of whom stood Élie de Beaumont.

This heavy, sluggish opposition seemed immovable: nothing that Boucher could do or say appeared to lighten the pressure of the orthodox theological opinion behind it—not even his belief that these fossils were remains of men drowned at the Deluge of Noah, and that they were proofs of the literal exactness of Genesis seemed to help the matter. His opponents felt instinctively that such discoveries boded danger to the accepted view, and they were right: Boucher himself soon saw the folly of trying to account for them by the orthodox theory which he had adopted at first.