Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples | Page 9

nothing to surprise us in this; it is human nature
not to take readily to anything new, or to entertain ideas opposed to old
established traditions. The most distinguished men find it difficult to
break with the prejudices of their education and the yet more firmly
established prejudices of the systems they have themselves built up.
The words of the great French fabulist will never cease to be true:
Man is ice to truth; But fire to lies.
One of the masters of modern science, Cuvier, has said[14]:
"Everything tends to prove that the human race did not exist in the
countries where the fossil bones were found at the time of the
convulsions which buried those bones; but I will not therefore conclude
that man did not exist at all before that epoch; he may have inherited
certain 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watercourses had been replaced by the rivers of the present day; they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