Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 25.djvu/46

 vered a large number of bones which proved that the cave was open in prehistoric times. A full statement of the bearing of this discovery upon the value of the evidence afforded by the cave, accompanied by the most careful plans and sections, would have been published, had not Mr. King's increasing illness forbidden work of any kind. After his return to England he gradually became worse, until in 1867 he resolved to winter in Algiers, and to give up his favourite pursuits and deeply cherished schemes of work. Thence he travelled to Switzerland, and, daily becoming weaker, he died on the 8th of July, 1868, at Pontresina, in the Engadine, in full possession of all his faculties.

One of Mr. King's last expressed wishes was that his collection, containing all Professor Heer's type specimens of preglacial vegetation, and a large number of Dr. Falconer's type-specimens of Mammals, should be presented to some museum where it might be used for the advancement of the science he loved so well. Accordingly it has found a resting-place in the Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street.

Quaternary Geology has suffered additional losses among our Foreign Members in M. Boucher de Perthes and M. Morlot, whose names will be always honourably associated with that revival of scientific inquiry into the antiquity of man of which this generation has been witness.

M. Jacques Boucher de Creveccoeur de Perthes, who died in August last, was born in the year 1789, at the commencement of that great era of change which divides modern France from old France. He could hardly recollect the Terror ; but the Directory, the Consulate, the Empire, the Restoration, the second Republic, and the second Empire, all had swept before him.

Possessed of an independent fortune, of considerable and varied powers and wide sympathies, M. Boucher de Perthes early resigned an official appointment in order to devote the long remainder of a healthy and vigorous life to travel, to literature, to archaeology, and to science. His industry was exemplary, his enthusiasm boundless, his imagination fully equal to all demands made upon it. Hence it is no wonder that his fertile pen poured forth travels, political speculations, and a very readable novel — that he occupied himself with the past of man, and even with the future of woman. But he is most widely known by the great stimulus which his 'Antiquites Celtiques et Antediluviennes,' published in 1849, gave to the study of the evidence of the antiquity of man which is afforded by the worked implements found imbedded in the same deposits with extinct animals.

The geologists of his own country treated M. Boucher de Perthes's work with indifference and neglect ; and no doubt popular historians of science, judging after the event, will hereafter visit them with reprobation for their blindness and their prejudices. But just and critical students of the ' Antiquites ' will, I think, be able completely