Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/693

Rh and in the pile-dwellings of our lakes and peat-beds we have relics of the Stone and Bronze eras, the beginnings of which lie beyond the reach of even tradition.

Nor is the limit yet attained. Thanks to the discoveries of the past few decades, we trace the existence of man back to a point antedating our earliest history by we know not how many centuries. Of this time, only a few bones and rudely-wrought stones are left as the witnesses—dumb, yet eloquent, and fulfilling in their way the saying, "If men hold their peace, the very stones will cry out."

The question was long since raised, whether traces of human existence had been, or were to be, found in the sand and gravel of the Post-Tertiary or Diluvial period, which immediately preceded the present. Some affirmed the finding of such remains in these, and the contemporaneous deposits of certain caves, while most geologists rejected such statements as erroneous, or, at best, unauthenticated, plausibly urging that ancient animal and recent human remains might easily have become intermingled. And such researches were discredited and discouraged by Cuvier's magisterial dictum, that man did not exist in the Diluvial period, and that it was, therefore, vain to look for evidences of his existence.

Some twenty years ago, however, M. Boucher de Perthes discovered a quantity of rude stone implements in the diluvial gravel-beds of Abbeville, in the valley of the Somme, in intimate connection with bones of mammoths. This discovery attracting much attention, in 1858 the French Academy of Sciences sent to the spot a committee of investigation, composed, be it not forgotten, of men utterly skeptical as to the fact at issue. This committee, strengthened by the accession of several English geologists, worked long and carefully at its task, and the Academy's discussions upon its reports were earnest and thorough; yet, the result was the complete confirmation of De Perthe's reputed discoveries, and of the conclusions he had drawn therefrom. Cuvier was confuted; the existence of man in the Diluvial period was established. Similar discoveries in the open country and caves of Germany, Spain, Italy, England, Belgium, and especially France, followed in rapid succession.

We cannot mention, much less describe, all the localities in which have been found the closely-conjoined remains of man and of animals, confessedly belonging to the drift or Diluvial period. We shall discuss only a few of the many cases, of which we may safely affirm that the often easy and common mingling of ancient with recent remains could not have occurred. To do this the more intelligently, we shall speak briefly first of the characteristics and deposits of the Diluvial and later prehistoric periods, and then of the human remains therein found.

—The bottom-lands of our new valleys, of the Rhine, for example, chiefly consist of widely-extended