did reader's confidence in my care in pursuing this by no means simple investigation.

The imbedding stratum, or place of sepulture, of the worked flints, geologically regarded, is-for Abbeville, Amiens, and the other localities on the Somme-a rudelydeposited, irregularly strewn bed of somewhat fragmentary chalk-flint, containing some flint-sand, a little pulverised chalk, and occasional large blocks or boulders, of a hard quartzose Eocene sandstone.

This evidently diluvial matrix, the repository, also, of the bones of gigantic mammalian quadrupeds, rests directly on a somewhat uneven and eroded floor of chalk, out of the wreck of the upper beds of which stratum the nodules of flint forming the greater part of the gravel have been derived. It is overlaid in its turn by no less than three other strata, of aqueous origin, but all formed under dissimilar conditions.

First above the bone and hatchet entombing gravel lies a greyish white and brownish sand, imbedding_several species of freshwater and terrestrial shells, identical with species now living in this part of the globe. Though fine-grained, these sands bear the marks of a rather brief process of deposition, for portions of them are unusually angular, or unworn in the grain, and their laminæ in many places bend and wave to conform to the greatly eroded and undulating floor of the gravel on which they repose. Solitary specimens of the worked flints are, on rare occasions, met with in the lower part of these sands, and also, as rarely, the bones of the fossil elephant.

Third, in ascending order above the chalk occurs a second gravel, composed exclusively of chalk-flints in a rolled and more or less fractured condition. This bed varying in thickness, at St Acheul, near Amiens, from two to five feet, exhibits conspicuously at this locality the marks of having been deposited or pushed along in very turbulent waters; for its lower boundary, beheld in section at the gravel-pits, shows a succession of sharply-conical, and somewhat spiral, deep depressions in the upper

surface of the sand beneath it, identical in every feature with the funnel-shaped pits bored by any strong, swiftly-eddying current in a yielding bottom of mud or sand.

Fourth, and uppermost in the series of loose beds, is a brown brick-earth, or ferruginous sandy clay or loam, interspersed with numerous small splinters of chalk-flint. At St Acheul, and elsewhere near Amiens, where it is used extensively for conversion into bricks, this loam, which is but faintly laminated, is generally about three or four feet thick. Like the torrential gravel on which it rests, it is destitute not only of mammalian organic remains, but of the curious instruments in flint associated with them in the lowermost of the four superficial deposits. It does enclose some remains of another sort, which, when viewed in their relations to the vestiges of man beneath them, never fail greatly to impress the beholder by the contrasts they suggest in time, and the state of human art. These are numerous Roman graves, or rather regularly-shapen stone coffins of unquestioned Roman antiquity, oftentimes containing the skeletons of their inmates in a firm and wellconserved state. When the student of Time, deciphering these four successive chapters in the physical history of our globe, drops his gaze from these tombs,-which descend but a small yard below the grass, yet take him back through almost onethird of the usually imagined lifetime of the world,-and lets his vision, pausing at intervals upon the monuments of alternate past ages of repose, and epochs of turbulent floods, rest at last, some twelve or sixteen feet lower in the earth, on a physical record, to him as expressive as the graves above, of the past existence, near the same spot, of a race of men unacquainted with the metals—what wonder, with his critical spirit prostrated before his imagination, that he should forget to scrutinise the evidence, and should quit the ground with a sentiment which he confounds with a logi cal conviction of the vastness of the ages covered by the record? His inquisitiveness keenly aroused by this impression, he interrogates afresh the pages of this stony register for other

mon

and more palpable proofs of the human beings, and the extreme age indicated in the objects he has beheld; and, perplexed at the total absence of any traces of man himself -of even a single human tooth, or fragment of a human bone, where other teeth and other bones no better capable of preservation are of comoccurrence-he withdraws a second time from the scene, cogitating many doubts, and at last, under the suggestions of a philosophical scepticism-the only right mood for analysing the apparently contradictory evidence before him he asks himself the following questions: Are the flint-implements these imputed products of man's skill-actually the work of human hands? Again, though they and the mammalian bones, held to be distinctive of the Diluvium, do lie entombed together, does this demonstrate that the once owners of each-the men who left the flints, and the animals who possessed the bones also lived together in the same epoch?

Admitting that they were contemporary, how far does this fact of itself establish the great antiquity of the human race?

And, lastly, apart altogether from the proofs of age, deduced from the association of the human relics with the remains of the extinct quadrupeds, what is the geological evidence of the extreme agedness of both in the nature of the deposits of sand, gravel, and brick-earth placed above them and in the intimations these give us of the time occupied in their formation?

Such are the more prominent queries suggested by the phenomena, and such, indeed, the actual questions asked every day of the scientific observer, by intelligent readers of the still very fragmentary literature relating to this new and strange archæologic problem.

It will be my object in this Essay to answer in a candid spirit-as far as the state of existing facts, gathered from a careful study of this literature, and from a recent visit to the French localities, and local, public, and private museums of the antiquities under discussion will enable methese several questions, very much

in the order in which they are here presented. As they cover the whole ground of opinion and inquiry opened by the late discoveries, I propose, before undertaking to consider them severally, to enunciate each of them at greater length.

On the threshold of this inquiry, then, the critical mind is confronted with the following doubts :

Are these curious lumps of flint, called Antediluvian hatchets, &c.so abnormal in shape and aspectunequivocally the work of human hands; or may they not be products of physical agencies which have fractured the native flint nodules into the semblance of man's workmanship?

Granting them to have been shaped by the skill of men, were the men who fashioned them actually the contemporaries of the extinct gigantic quadrupeds whose bones lie entombed in the same gravel; or are we justified in supposing that the quadrupeds and the implements were buried at different epochs-the quadrupeds by an earlier incursion of waters, the flint tools by a later one which commingled them with the bones?

Again, granting that these flints testify truly to the existence of Man upon the earth at the epoch of their burial; and granting also that the rational beings who shaped them, and the extinct animals whose bones are associated with them, really lived in the same time upon our globe, what is the probable antiquity of the period when they thus coexisted? Would such a demonstration of their contemporaneity establish a past duration for the human race upon the earth, far transcending the commonly believed age of man; or may it not, under an admissible interpretation of the geological phenomena, be compat ible, if not with the prevalent belief, with at least this conviction, that any remoter antiquity for the dawn of the human species remains still incapable of demonstration?

Independently of any attempt to establish a remote antiquity for the makers of the flint-implements, from the co-existence of these latter with the remains of extinct mammals in the diluvium or drift, may we not infer their extreme age from the simple

circumstance that they lie buried so many feet (twenty feet in some instances) beneath the soil, in a deposit evidently never, until now, turned over by human hands, and under three or four successively imposed strata, each one of which betokens a separate period of geologic time; or are we required, by known laws of sedimentary action, to adopt a different interpretation of the appearances, and infer these accumulations to have been possible within the period ordinarily assigned to the residence on earth of the human family?

Are the so-called flint-implements of human workmanship, or the results of physical agencies?

The fundamental question of the genuineness of the flint-hatchets as works of human art, naturally presents itself to all inquirers whose impressions are drawn from loose general descriptions, or who may have chanced to see only a few specimens; but doubt invariably gives way to a confident conviction of their having taken their form under the hands of man so soon as the observer examines any large assemblage of specimens, in the districts where they are found, and where he is enabled to contrast them with the various aspects assumed by the unwrought native flints from the midst of which they have been extracted. If the student of this dim page of early history is inclined to possess himself of its truths, he should go first of all to Abbeville. There, in the gravelpits near the town, but especially in the ample private collection of M. Boucher de Perthes, the discoverer, twenty years ago, of the human origin of the wrought flints, and till lately their only interpreter, he will quickly learn to recognise their artificial characters. Inspecting them as they lie in classified arrangement, he will soon become acquainted with their several types, and will presently grow conscious of a new sense, as it were, in distinguishing the human workmanship in its different phases, from any of the forms impressed by mechanical impact and attrition upon the unwrought fragments in the quarries. Iam warranted in asserting that the most sceptical visitor to M. de Perthes's museum will go away a con

vert to the opinion that the many hundred specimens there assembled bear the plainest traces of human skill, and are genuine vouchers of the existence of Man in the age of the fossil elephant and other gigantic animals entombed in the Diluvium of geologists. Upon this point we possess indeed the candid testimony of some of the most eminent geologists and archæologists of our times, who have acknowledged that entering the collection with scepticism, they left it completely convinced that these flints owe their distinctive shapes to the agency of man. Among the French savans, converts to his opinion of their origin, M. Boucher de Perthes cites Alexander Brongniart, Rigollot, Gaudry, Buteux, de Sauley, and other well-known antiquaries and geologists; and among the English the highly authoritative names of Sir Charles Lyell, J. Prestwich, Godwin Austin, W, Milne, J. W. Flower, and J. Evans, nearly all of whom have either recorded their views or frankly discussed them in the meetings of the metropolitan scientific societies. For myself, I feel called upon-in justice to M. Boucher de Perthes's inadequately acknowledged discoveries, and in fealty to truth-to confess, that before I inspected his great collection, I had serious misgivings in regard to the origin of their shape, even though I had seen a few isolated specimens of the flint knives and hatchets. I thought it not impossible that mechanical or molecular forces might have caused their contour by splintering and chipping the natural flint nodules while undergoing movements among each other or by sudden changes of temperature. But the consideration which most induced a sense of scepticism was one which, as it enters largely into the question of the validity of many kinds of evidence, especially the authenticity of facts observed with reference to preconceived hypotheses, I may pause a moment to notice. I allude to the trite subject of the influence of the imagination in perverting the perceptions of the senses, more particularly to that mode of its interference in which the visual impres

sion of an object is often distorted into the semblance of some already established mental image, until it may be said, the mind it is which sees, while the eye only suggests. This tendency to illusion is notoriously strong in all observers of ardent imaginative temperaments. Indeed, the domination of the mental idea over the sensuous impression is a general law of the human mind, exemplified in the ease with which any person, child or sage, once set upon the search, will find profiles of animals and men in every pass ing cloud, or still more strikingly in the lamentable credulity of multitudes of otherwise sober-minded men and women who of late have thought they saw every conceivable impossibility, dignifying the self-deception by a name, and calling it Clairvoyance or Spirit-rapping, as if thus entitling it would make it rational. So treacherous, as well as so common, is the operation of this law, that I confess I had my misgivings lest, in searching among the beds of flints broken into all imaginable shapes, explorers with their attention focussed to one class of objects, and blind to every other class, might have been misled into collecting, as the products of human art, what only bore to such a more or less near likeness.

Alive to this liability of the mind, when pre-occupied with certain images, to find their counterparts in nature, and to look for and find types, by neglecting the transitional or aberrant forms which fill the intervals between these, and tend to dispel its preconceptions, a careful investigator will entertain a philosophical distrust of the distinctions between objects as they are represented in classified collections or museums, until he assures himself, by a study of the field from whence the objects have been drawn, that intermediate shapes and structures incompatible with the grouping adopted, do not exist. This is the test to which the truthloving student of the genuineness of the worked flints should subject the phenomena. Let him acquaint himself familiarly with the several forms and aspects of the stone implements in the only full collection extant, that of M. de Perthes, until

he is confident he can recognise any type of them amid the promiscuous heaps of the newly-dug flint rubble in the quarries, and let him then repair to as many of these quarries of Abbeville and Amiens, whence the implements were taken, as he can visit, and in the midst of all the objects, natural and artificial, where no distrusts can disturb him about the tendencies of the mind unconsciously to garble the evidence, let him search for fragments in every stage intermediate between the worked specimens and the native unbroken nodules, but especially those which simulate most nearly the types recognised as human workmanship. I predict from personal experience that he will become after this-the only fair mode of sifting the physical statistics of the case-entirely reassured as to the essential distinction between the two classes of fragments. His now awakened eye will have convinced him that, while the accidentally or physically fractured flakes and splinters are indefinitely multifarious in pattern, size, and mode of chipping, and the artificially or designedly fashioned specimens of the museum are of a few specific types and of one unvarying style of fracture, there is between the two classes a distinction of kind, not of degree, each class possessing an unmistakable physiognomy or facies of its own-one the aspect of accident, the other the expression of intention or iteration of purpose.

This generic character of the wrought flints, whatever their specific pattern, may be best described as consisting in a certain unity of feature in the splintering by which the original nodule or fragment was reduced to the pattern we behold. If the specimen belong to that very common type which rudely resembles in form a spindle root or rather a much elongated pear, the flat conchoidal surfaces left by the successive flaking down of the mass are all manifestly so directed as to result in a single blunt point, and in a rudely hemispherical end for the hand to grasp. If, again, the specimen appertains to the group called Hatchets by M. Boucher

de Perthes the normal shape of which is very nearly the solid which would be enclosed by the bowls of two equal and large table-spoons united at their margins-the chippings by which the lump has been trimmed down to this pattern concur, with remarkable accord, in producing an edge round the implement, which is generally beautifully straight when the specimen is looked at edgewise, but serrated, by the alternation of the chipping, into a very efficient saw. These have almost invariably a sharply oval and a bluntly oval end, as our resembling it to the bowl of a spoon when viewed flatwise intimates. One of the plainest indications of their having been fashioned by man is, their beautiful oval symmetry of outline; another is the balance of their two sides, or what a zoologist would call their bilateral symmetry. Surely it is not an admissible supposition that native nodules of flint, which, let it be remarked, do not affect a regular elliptical contour, could, to the number of hundreds, perhaps thousands, in a single gravel bank, acquire by mere mechanical abrasion or collision a shape so symmetrical, yet so out of that spherical pattern which promiscuous rubbing or splintering invariably tends to approach in a homogeneous substance like flint.

Does the mere association in the same deposit of the flint-implements, and the bones of extinct quadrupeds, prove that the artificers of the flinttools, and the animals, co-existed in time?

Assuming it to be demonstrable that the flint-implements have been shaped by human hands, the interesting question immediately arises, how long ago lived the men who fashioned them, and who have left behind them no other as yet discovered traces of even their existence? As these antediluvian relics are unassociated with the faintest clue to historic human time, it is obviously impossible to assign to them a definite epoch in the scale of centuries. Geology is our sole guide to their age, and its chronology, be it remembered, does not in the present state of the science concern itself with measurable periods or positive dates, but

only with relative ones; not with the duration of conditions and events in time, but rather with the order in which they have occurred. Even thus restricted, the inquiry, how long ago? in the sense, not of how many years or other fixed cycles, but in the sense of where in the ascertained succession of events lived that primeval race of men, is still replete with an enticing interest. Let us then give our attention to the geological aspects of the phenomena connected with the worked flints, and learn what answers, in terms of relative time, we can extort respecting the antiquity of these, and whether to the question of their antedating historic time, or the reported age of mankind, they can answer us at all. But before approaching this the main point of my communication, it is needful to consider an objection respecting the genuineness of the introduction or imbedding of the "implements" within the stratum containing them, which is frequently offered by persons uninitiated in geology, and who have not examined the Diluvium and superficial gravels. They sceptically ask, may not the "wrought flints" belong to historic times, and have insinuated themselves downwards from the soil into the stratum which now entombs them, by mere force of incessantly acting gravity, either through chinks in the over-resting deposits, or between their fragments and particles? Preposterous as this question seems to the geologist or to the practical excavator of the subsoil, it is so often and so confidently advanced, that it demands an answer, and our reply is, that a few minutes' inspection of the beds containing and overlying the flint-implements of the Somme will assure any observer that they are entirely destitute of the imagined crevices, and are moreover altogether too compact and immovable to admit of any such insinuation or percolation of surface objects. The gravel is indeed so firm, that a live mole, with all his admirable appliances for burrowing, could not possibly enter it so firmly imbedded, that the workmen use heavy iron picks to disintegrate the half-cemented materials.