Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples | Page 9

districts of small extent whence he re-peopled the earth after these terrible events." Cuvier's disciples went beyond the doctrines of their master. He made certain reservations; they admitted none, and one of the most illustrious, Elie de Beaumont, rejected with scorn the possibility of the co-existence of man and the mammoth.[15] Later, retracting an assertion of which perhaps he himself recognized the exaggeration, he contented himself with saying that the district where the flints and bones had been collected belonged to a recent period, and to the shifting deposits of the slopes contemporary with the peaty alluvium. He added -- scientific passions are by no means the least intense, or the least deeply rooted -- that the worked flints may have been of Roman origin, and that the deposits of Moulin-Quignon may have covered a Roman road! This might indeed have been the case in the DEPARTEMENT DU NORD, where a road laid down by the conquerors of Gaul has completely disappeared beneath deposits of peat, but it could not be true at Moulin-Quignon, where gravels form the culminating point of the ridge. Moreover, the laying down of the most ancient peats of the French valleys did not begin until the great watercourses had been replaced by the rivers of the present day; they never contain, relics of any species but such as are still extant; whereas it was with the remains of extinct mammals that the flints were found.
It was against powerful adversaries such as this that the modest savant of Abbeville had to maintain his opinion. "No one," he says, "cared to verify the facts of the case, merely giving as a reason, that these facts were impossible." Weight was added to his complaint by the refusal in England about the same blue to print a communication from the Society of Natural History of Torquay, which announced the discovery of flints worked by the hand of man, associated, as were those of the Somme, with the bones of extinct animals. The fact appeared altogether too incredible!
But the time when justice would be done was to come at last. Dr. Falconer visited first Amiens and then Abbeville, to examine the deposits and the flints and bones found in them. In January, 1859, and in 1860, other Englishmen of science followed his example; and excavations were made, under their direction, in the massive strata which rise, from the chalk forming their base, to a height of 108 feet above the level of the Somme. Their search was crowned with success, and they lost no blue in leaking known to the world the results they had obtained, and the convictions to which these results lead led.[16] In 1859 Prestwich announced to the Royal Society of London that the flints found in the bed of the Somme were undoubtedly the work of the hand of plan, that they had been found in strata that lead not been disturbed, and that the men who cut these flints bad lived at a period prior to the time when our earth assumed its present configuration. Sir Charles Lyell, in his opening address at a session of the British Association, did not hesitate to support the conclusions of Prestwich. It was now the turn of Frenchmen of science to arrive at Abbeville. MM. Gaudry and Pouchet themselves extracted hatchets from the Quaternary deposits of the Somme.[17] These facts were vouched for by the well-known authority, M. de Quatrefages, who had already constituted himself their advocate. All that was now needed was the test of a public discussion, and the meeting of the Anthropological Society of Paris supplied a suitable occasion. The question received long and searching scientific examination. All doubt was removed, and M. Isidore Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire was the mouth-piece of an immense majority of his colleagues, when he declared that the objections to the great antiquity of the human race had all melted away. The conversion of men so illustrious was followed of course by that of the general public, and, more fortunate than many another, Boucher de Perthes bad the satisfaction before his death of seeing a new branch of knowledge founded on his discoveries, attain to a just and durable popularity in the scientific world.
It must not, however, be supposed that popular superstition yielded at once to the decisions of science, and it is curious to meet with the same ideas in the most different climates, and in districts widely separated from each other:[18] Everywhere worked flints are attributed to a supernatural origin; everywhere they are looked upon as amulets with the power of protecting their owner, his house or his flocks. Russian peasants believe them to be the arrows of thunder, and fathers transmit them to their children as precious heirlooms. The same belief is held in France, Ireland, and Scotland, in Scandinavia,