Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples | Page 7

are well known:
Pyrenaeisque sub antris Ignea flumineae legere ceraunia nymphae.
Marbodius, Bishop of Rennes, in the eleventh century, sang of the
thunder-stones in some Latin verses which have come down to us, and
an old poet of the sixteenth century in his turn exclaimed, on seeing the
strange bones around him
Le roc de Tarascon hebergea quelquefois Les geants qui couroyent les
montagnes de Foix, Dont tant d'os successifs rendent le temoignage.
With these stones, in fact, were found numerous bones of great size,
which had belonged to unknown creatures. Latin authors speak of
similar bones found in Asia Minor, which they took to be those of
giants of an extinct race. This belief was long maintained; in 1547 and
again in 1667 fossil remains were found in the cave of San Ciro near
Palermo; and Italian savants decided that they had belonged to men
eighteen feet high. Guicciadunus speaks of the bones of huge elephants
carefully preserved in the Hotel de Ville at Antwerp as the bones of a
giant named Donon, who lived 1300 years before the Christian era.
In days nearer our own the roost cultivated people accepted the remains
of a gigantic batrachian[4] as those of a man who had witnessed the
flood, and it was the same with a tortoise found in Italy scarcely thirty
years ago. Dr. Carl, in a work published at Frankfort[5] in 1709, took
up another theory, and, such was the general ignorance at the time, he
used long arguments to prove that the fossil bones were the result
neither of a freak of nature, nor of the action of a plastic force, and it

was not until near the end of his life that the illustrious Camper could
bring himself to admit the extinction of certain species, so totally
against Divine revelation did such a phenomenon appear to him to be.
Prejudices were not, however, always so obstinate. For more than three
centuries stones worked by the hand of man have been preserved in the
Museum of the Vatican, and as long ago as the time of Clement VIII.
his doctor, Mercati, declared these stones to have been the weapons of
antediluvians who had been still ignorant of the use of metals.
During the early portion of the eighteenth century a pointed black flint,
evidently the head of a spear, was found in London with the tooth of an
elephant. It was described in the newspapers of the day, and placed in
the British Museum.
In 1723 Antoine de Jussieu said, at a meeting of the ACADEMIE DES
SCIENCES, that these worked stones had been made where they were
found, or brought from distant countries. He supported his arguments
by an excellent example of the way in which savage races still polish
stones, by rubbing them continuously together.
A few years later the members of the ACADEMIE DES
INSCRIPTIONS in their turn, took up the question, and Mahudel, one
of its members, in presenting several stones, showed that they bad
evidently been cut by the hand of man. "An examination of them," he
said, "affords a proof of the efforts of our earliest ancestors to provide
for their wants, and to obtain the necessaries of life." He added that
after the re-peopling of the earth after the deluge, men were ignorant of
the use of metals. Mahudel's essay is illustrated by drawings, some of
which we reproduce (Fig. 1), showing wedges, hammers, hatchets, and
flint arrow-beads taken, he tells us, from various private collections.[6]
Bishop Lyttelton, writing in 1736, speaks of such weapons as having
been made at a remote date by savages ignorant of the use of metals,[7]
and Sir W. Dugdale, an eminent antiquary of the seventeenth century,
attributed to the ancient Britons some flint hatchets found in
Warwickshire, and thinks they were made when these weapons alone
were used.[8]

FIGURE 1
Stone weapons described by Mahudel in 1734.
A communication made by Frere to the Royal Society of London
deserves mention here with a few supplementary remarks.[9]
This distinguished man of science found at Hoxne, in Suffolk, about
twelve feet below the surface of the soil, worked flints, which had
evidently been the natural weapons of a people who had no knowledge
of metals. With these flints were found some strange bones with the
gigantic jaw of an animal then unknown. Frere adds that the number of
chips of flint was so great that the workmen, ignorant of their scientific
value, used them in road-making. Every thing pointed to the conclusion
that Hoxne was the place where this primitive people manufactured the
weapons and implements they used, so that as early as the end of last
century a member of the Royal Society formulated the propositions,[10]
now fully accepted, that at a very remote epoch men used nothing