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Acheul, and only a mile or two distant, where the workmen, although familiar with the forms, and knowing the marketable value of the articles above described, assured me that they had never been able to find a single implement. Mr. Evans classifies the implements under three heads, two of which, the spear heads and the oval or almond-shaped kinds, have already been described.
Thus M. Rutot believes that during the ice-age each big freeze was followed by an equally big flood, preceding each fresh return of milder weather. One of these floods, he thinks, must have drowned out the neat-fingered race of St. Acheul, and left the coast clear for the Mousterians with their coarser type of culture. Perhaps they were coarser in their physical type as well.
It was in 1826 that Boucher de Perthes first published his opinion; but it was not until 1816 and 1847 that he announced his discovery at Menchecourt, near Abbeville, and at Moulin-Quignon and Saint Acheul, in the alluvial deposits of the Somme, of flints shaped into the form of hatchets associated with the remains of extinct animals such as the mammoth, the cave lion, the RHINOCEROS INCISIVUS, the hippopotamus, and other animals whose presence in France is not alluded to either in history or tradition.
Marine Shells in same. Cyrena fluminalis. Mammalia. Entire Skeleton of Rhinoceros. Flint Implements, why found low down in Fluviatile Deposits. Rivers shifting their Channels. Relative Ages of higher and lower-level Gravels. Section of Alluvium of St. Acheul. Two Species of Elephant and Hippopotamus coexisting with Man in France. Absence of Human Bones in tool-bearing Alluvium, how explained.
Among these flints shown we notice two fine specimens of the pear-shaped type of St. Acheul, with curious adze-shaped implements of primitive type to left and right. Below, to the right, is a very primitive instrument of Chellean type, being merely a sharpened pebble.
Acheul and the era of those engulfed rivers which, in the basin of the Meuse near Liege, swept into many a rent and cavern the bones of Man and of the mammoth and cave-bear.
Finally, three or four feet of blue clay resting immediately on bed-rock were such as might be produced by the sea, and thus probably betokened its presence at this level in the still remoter past. Here the strata are mostly geological. Man only comes in at one point. I might have taken a far more striking case the best I know from St. Acheul, a suburb of Amiens in the north of France.
Acheul, 2 or 3 miles distant, to which I shall now allude. The terrace of St. Acheul may be described as a gently sloping ledge of Chalk, covered with gravel, topped as usual with loam or fine sediment, the surface of the loam being 100 feet above the Somme, and about 150 above the sea. Many stone coffins of the Gallo-Roman period have been dug out of the upper portion of this alluvial mass.
"The great point was not to leave the workmen for a single instant, and to satisfy oneself by actual inspection whether the hatchets were found in situ. Prestwich's visit to St. Acheul, seen the sections at Abbeville and Amiens, and had come to the opinion that the hatchets were imbedded in the "lower diluvium," and that their origin was as ancient as that of the mammoth and the rhinoceros.
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.
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