region, she may as well be broken up in despair, as she can be of no further use for human purposes.
Whether this will or will not be her fate must depend on the result of the new impulse which has within the last ten or twelve years been given to the enquiry. Hitherto it seems certainly to be in a direction which, it is to be feared, is not likely to lead to any greater degree of precision in the enquiry. While the Danish "savans" were arranging their collections in the museums at Copenhagen, M. Boucher de Perthes was quietly forming a collection of flint implements from the drift gravels of the valley of the Somme, which far exceeded all hitherto found in antiquity. For many years his discoveries were ridiculed and laughed at, till in 1858 the late Hugh Falconer visited his museum at Abbeville, and being then fresh from his investigations at Kent's Hole and the Gower Caves,[1] he at once saw their value and proclaimed it to the world. Since then it has not been disputed that the flint implements found in the valley of the Somme are the works of man, and that from the position in which they are found their fabricators must have lived at a period on the edge of the glacial epoch, and when the configuration of the continent differed from what it now is, and when probably the British isles were still joined to France. Similar implements have before and since been found in Suffolk,[2] and other parts of England in analogous circumstances, and all allied with a fauna which was extinct in these parts before historic times.[3] If you ask a geologist how long ago the circumstances of the globe were such as these conditions represent, he will answer at once not less than a million of years! But they deal in large figures, and it is not necessary to investigate them now. It was a very long time ago.
Even more interesting than these for our present purposes was
- ↑ In 1797, Mr. John Frere found flint implements identical with those at Abbeville, and published an account of them, with engravings, in vol. xiii. of the 'Archæologia,' in 1800.
- ↑ 'Memoirs of Hugh Falconer,' by Dr. Murchison, ii. p. 596.
- ↑ In the first years of the last century a flint implement, together with some bones of the Elephas primigenus, were found in an excavation in Grays Inn Lane. An engraving of it was published in 1715, and the implement itself is now in the British Museum.
