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If the reader will refer to the section of the Pleistocene sands and gravels of Menchecourt, near Abbeville, given at page 96, he will perfectly understand the relations of the ancient Thames alluvium to the modern channel and plain of the river, and their relation, on the other hand, to the boundary formations of older date, whether Tertiary or Cretaceous.
The evidence obtained by naturalists that some of the extinct mammalia of Menchecourt really lived and died in this part of France, at the time of the embedding of the flint tools in fluviatile strata, is most satisfactory; and not the less so for having been put on record long before any suspicion was entertained that works of art would ever be detected in the same beds.
Some of the flint tools in the gravel of Abbeville have their angles very perfect, others have been much triturated, as if in the bed of the main river or some of its tributaries. The mammalia most frequently cited as having been found in the deposits Numbers 2 and 3 at Menchecourt, are the following: Elephas primigenius. Rhinoceros tichorhinus. Equus fossilis, Owen. Bos primigenius.
As a stratum containing exclusively land and freshwater shells usually underlies the fluvio-marine sands at Menchecourt, it seems that the river first prevailed there, after which the land subsided; and then there was an upheaval which raised the country to a greater height than that at which it now stands, after which there was a second sinking, indicated by the position of the peat, as already explained.
All these changes happened since Man first inhabited this region. At several places in the environs of Abbeville there are fluviatile deposits at a higher level by 50 feet than the uppermost beds at Menchecourt, resting in like manner on the Chalk.
One of these occurs in the suburbs of the city at Moulin Quignon, 100 feet above the Somme and on the same side of the valley as Menchecourt, and containing flint implements of the same antique type and the bones of elephants; but no marine shells have been found there, nor in any gravel or sand at higher elevations than the Menchecourt marine shells.
The Cyrena fluminalis of Menchecourt and the hippopotamus of St.
Thus M. Baillon, writing in 1834 to M. Ravin, says: "They begin to meet with fossil bones at the depth of 10 or 12 feet in the Menchecourt sand-pits, but they find a much greater quantity at the depth of 18 and 20 feet. Some of them were evidently broken before they were embedded, others are rounded, having, without doubt, been rolled by running water.
When we ascend the valley of the Somme, from Abbeville to Amiens, a distance of about 25 miles, we observe a repetition of all the same alluvial phenomena which we have seen exhibited at Menchecourt and its neighbourhood, with the single exception of the absence of marine shells and of Cyrena fluminalis. In both the upper and lower gravels, as Dr.
The President of the British Association, in his opening speech at the meeting of 1860, affirms the immense antiquity of these flint implements, and remarks: "At Menchecourt, in the suburbs of Abbeville, a nearly entire skeleton of the Siberian rhinoceros is said to have been taken out about forty years ago, a fact affording an answer to the question often raised, as to whether the bones of the extinct mammalia could have been washed out of an older alluvium into a newer one, and so redeposited and mingled with the relics of human workmanship.
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