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In the year 1855, the tibia and femur of a large bird equalling at least the ostrich in size were found at Meudon, near Paris, at the base of the Plastic clay. This bird, to which the name of Gastornis Parisiensis has been assigned, appears, from the Memoirs of MM. Hebert, Lartet, and Owen, to belong to an extinct genus.
They were found near Auch, in the Department of Gers, in latitude 43 degrees 39' N. About forty miles west of Toulouse. They were referred by MM. Lartet and Blainville to a genus closely allied to the Gibbon, to which they gave the name of Pliopithecus. The fossil remains of this animal consisted of a portion of a lower jaw with teeth and the shaft of a humerus.
Among the fresh-water strata of this age near the base of the Pyrenees are marls, limestones and sands, in which the eminent comparative anatomist, M. Lartet, has obtained a great number of fossil mammalia common to the faluns of the Loire and the Upper Miocene beds of Switzerland, such as Dinotherium giganteum and Mastodon angustidens; also the bones of quadrumana, or of the ape and monkey tribe, which were discovered in 1837, the first of that order of quadrupeds detected in Europe.
It is astonishing to find some of them as fine as the steel needles of the present day, and with perfectly round eyes made with the help of nothing but a rough flint, and there would still be some doubt on the subject, if M. Lartet had not obtained exactly similar results by working on fragments of bone with the flints he had fouled in these excavations.
M. Lartet inferred at first that the bodies were bent down upon themselves in a squatting attitude, a posture known to have been adopted in most of the sepulchres of primitive times; and he has so represented them in his restoration of the cave: but this opinion he has since retracted.
The tract referred to has been described at intervals by several authors, of whom G. Schumacher, L. Lartet, Canon Tristram, M. Niebuhr, and C. M. Doughty may be specially mentioned in this connection. The most extensive manifestations of volcanic energy throughout this long tract of country appear to be concentrated at its extreme limits.
Even in the Perigord caves Lartet noticed some long slim needles which could not have been used for sewing skins; and he concluded that they were intended for more delicate work, perhaps even for embroidery. A new art, and one which we certainly should not have expected to find is now met with for the first time.
In its general characters, the skeleton of Anchitherium is very similar to that of the horse. In fact, Lartet and De Blainville called it Palæotherium equinum or hippoides; and De Christol, in 1847, said that it differed from Hipparion in little more than the characters of its teeth, and gave it the name of Hipparitherium.
But there are some caves in the departments of Dordogne, Aude, and other parts of the south of France, which are believed by M. Lartet to be of intermediate date between the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods. To this intermediate era M. Lartet gave, in 1863, the name of the "reindeer period," because vast quantities of the bones and horns of that deer have been met with in the French caverns.
Lartet and Christy, and engraved a hundred times in works on archæology, which forms one of the finest existing relics of pre-Glacial art.
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