Chapter 9

IMPLEMENTS.

General Position of Drift with extinct Mammalia in Valleys. Discoveries of M. Boucher de Perthes at Abbeville. Flint Implements found also at St. Acheul, near Amiens. Curiosity awakened by the systematic Exploration of the Brixham Cave. Flint Knives in same, with Bones of extinct Mammalia. Superposition of Deposits in the Cave. Visits of English and French Geologists to Abbeville and Amiens.

PLEISTOCENE ALLUVIUM CONTAINING FLINT IMPLEMENTS IN THE VALLEY OF THE SOMME.

Throughout a large part of Europe we find at moderate elevations above the present river-channels, usually at a height of less than 40 feet, but sometimes much higher, beds of gravel, sand, and loam containing bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, horse, ox, and other quadrupeds, some of extinct, others of living, species, belonging for the most part to the fauna already alluded to in the fourth chapter as characteristic of the interior of caverns. The greater part of these deposits contain fluviatile shells, and have undoubtedly been accumulated in ancient river-beds. These old channels have long since been dry, the streams which once flowed in them having shifted their position, deepening the valleys, and often widening them on one side.

It has naturally been asked, if Man co-existed with the extinct species of the caves, why were his remains and the works of his hands never embedded outside the caves in ancient river-gravel containing the same fossil fauna? Why should it be necessary for the geologist to resort for evidence of the antiquity of our race to the dark recesses of underground vaults and tunnels which may have served as places of refuge or sepulture to a succession of human beings and wild animals, and where floods may have confounded together in one breccia the memorials of the fauna of more than one epoch? Why do we not meet with a similar assemblage of the relics of Man, and of living and extinct quadrupeds, in places where the strata can be thoroughly scrutinised in the light of day?

Recent researches have at length demonstrated that such memorials, so long sought for in vain, do in fact exist, and their recognition is the chief cause of the more favourable reception now given to the conclusions which MM. Tournal, Christol, Schmerling, and others, arrived at thirty years ago respecting the fossil contents of caverns. [12]

A very important step in this new direction was made thirteen years after the publication of Schmerling's researches, by M. Boucher de Perthes, who found in ancient alluvium at Abbeville, in Picardy, some flint implements, the relative antiquity of which was attested by their geological position. The antiquarian knowledge of their discoverer enabled him to recognise in their rude and peculiar type a character distinct from that of the polished stone weapons of a later period, usually called "celts." In the first volume of his "Antiquites Celtiques," published in 1847, M. Boucher de Perthes styled these older tools "antediluvian," because they came from the lowest beds of a series of ancient alluvial strata bordering the valley of the Somme, which geologists had termed "diluvium." He had begun to collect these implements in 1841. From that time they had been annually dug out of the drift or deposits of gravel and sand, of which fine sections were laid open from 20 to 35 feet in depth, whenever excavations were made in repairing the fortifications of Abbeville; or as often as flints were wanted for the roads, or loam for making bricks. For years previously bones of quadrupeds of the genera elephant, rhinoceros, bear, hyaena, stag, ox, horse, and others, had been collected there, and sent from time to time to Paris to be examined and named by Cuvier, who had described them in his Ossements Fossiles. A correct account of the associated flint tools and of their position was given in 1847 by M. Boucher de Perthes in his work above cited, and they were stated to occur at various depths, often 20 or 30 feet from the surface, in sand and gravel, especially in those strata which were nearly in contact with the subjacent white Chalk. But the scientific world had no faith in the statement that works of art, however rude, had been met with in undisturbed beds of such antiquity. Few geologists visited Abbeville in winter, when the sand-pits were open, and when they might have opportunities of verifying the sections, and judging whether the instruments had really been embedded by natural causes in the same strata with the bones of the mammoth, rhinoceros, and other extinct mammalia. Some of the tools figured in the "Antiquites Celtiques" were so rudely shaped, that many imagined them to have owed their peculiar forms to accidental fracture in a river's bed; others suspected frauds on the part of the workmen, who might have fabricated them for sale, or that the gravel had been disturbed, and that the worked flints had got mingled with the bones of the mammoth long after that animal and its associates had disappeared from the earth.

No one was more sceptical than the late eminent physician of Amiens, Dr. Rigollot, who had long before (in the year 1819) written a memoir on the fossil mammalia of the valley of the Somme. He was at length induced to visit Abbeville, and, having inspected the collection of M. Boucher de Perthes, returned home resolved to look for himself for flint tools in the gravel-pits near Amiens. There, accordingly, at a distance of about 30 miles from Abbeville, he immediately found abundance of similar flint implements, precisely the same in the rudeness of their make, and the same in their geological position; some of them in gravel nearly on a level with the Somme, others in similar deposits resting on Chalk at a height of about 90 feet above the river.

Dr. Rigollot having in the course of four years obtained several hundred specimens of these tools, most of them from St. Acheul in the south-east suburbs of Amiens, lost no time in communicating an account of them to the scientific world, in a memoir illustrated by good figures of the worked flints and careful sections of the beds. These sections were executed by M. Buteux, an engineer well qualified for the task, who had written a good description of the geology of Picardy. Dr. Rigollot, in this memoir, pointed out most clearly that it was not in the vegetable soil, nor in the brick-earth with land and freshwater shells next below, but in the lower beds of coarse flint-gravel, usually 12, 20, or 25 feet below the surface, that the implements were met with, just as they had been previously stated by M. Boucher de Perthes to occur at Abbeville. The conclusion, therefore, which was legitimately deduced from all the facts, was that the flint tools and their fabricators were coeval with the extinct mammalia embedded in the same strata.

BRIXHAM CAVE, NEAR TORQUAY, DEVONSHIRE.

Four years after the appearance of Dr. Rigollot's paper, a sudden change of opinion was brought about in England respecting the probable co-existence, at a former period, of Man and many extinct mammalia, in consequence of the results obtained from a careful exploration of a cave at Brixham, near Torquay, in Devonshire. As the new views very generally adopted by English geologists had no small influence on the subsequent progress of opinion in France, I shall interrupt my account of the researches made in the valley of the Somme, by a brief notice of those which were carried on in 1858 in Devonshire with more than usual care and scientific method. Dr. Buckland, in his celebrated work, entitled "Reliquiae Diluvianae," published in 1823, in which he treated of the organic remains contained in caves, fissures, and "diluvial gravel" in England, had given a clear statement of the results of his own original observations, and had declared that none of the human bones or stone implements met with by him in any of the caverns could be considered to be as old as the mammoth and other extinct quadrupeds. Opinions in harmony with this conclusion continued until very lately to be generally in vogue in England; although about the time that Schmerling was exploring the Liege caves, the Reverend Mr. McEnery, a Catholic priest, residing near Torquay, had found in a cave one mile east of that town, called "Kent's Hole," in red loam covered with stalagmite, not only bones of the mammoth, tichorhine rhinoceros, hippopotamus, cave-bear, and other mammalia, but several remarkable flint tools, some of which he supposed to be of great antiquity, while there were also remains of Man in the same cave of a later date.*

(* The manuscript and plates prepared for a joint memoir on Kent's Hole, by Mr. McEnery and Dr. Buckland, have recently been published by Mr. Vivian of Torquay, from which, as well as from some of the unprinted manuscript, I infer that Mr. McEnery only refrained out of deference to Dr. Buckland from declaring his belief in the contemporaneousness of certain flint implements of an antique type and the bones of extinct animals. Two of these implements from Kent's Hole, figured in Plate 12 of the posthumous work above alluded to, approach very closely in form and size to the common Abbeville implements.)

About ten years afterwards, in a "Memoir on the Geology of South Devon," published in 1842 by the Geological Society of London,* an able geologist, Mr. Godwin-Austen, declared that he had obtained in the same cave (Kent's Hole) works of Man from undisturbed loam or clay, under stalagmite, mingled with the remains of extinct animals, and that all these must have been introduced "before the stalagmite flooring had been formed." He maintained that such facts could not be explained away by the hypothesis of sepulture, as in Dr. Buckland's well-known case of the human skeleton of Paviland, because in the Devon cave the flint implements were widely distributed through the loam, and lay beneath the stalagmite.

(* "Transactions of the Geological Society" 2nd series