secondly as to then-unearthing and exposure to our observation. And how rapidly one such discovery follows another may be partly inferred from the fact that some years since a magazine[1] was founded in Paris, devoted to this special topic; many courses of lectures upon it were delivered in the various cities of Europe; and for some years international congresses have been annually held, and societies and periodicals established, for the discussion of it and cognate subjects. The literature of the subject is already voluminous.
Let us revert to M. Boucher de Perthes's discoveries in the drift of the Somme Valley. Begun in 1841, they were described by him in a work published in 1847—a work then too little appreciated. But when, in 1858, and in the same locality, he discovered a human skull and various stone implements, in intimate association with remains of the various animals of that period, the attention of the French Academy was aroused, and the study of historical geology received a new impetus. Some, indeed, see in the discovery of De Perthes only a cheat, or at best a mistake, and doubt the antiquity of this skull and its contemporaneousness with the animals found with it. The entire collection is proved to be of the same age, however, by the whole manner of the intermingling of human skulls, flint knives of unmistakable human workmanship, and animal remains; and the genuineness of De Perthes's discoveries and the validity of the inferences drawn from them are confirmed by many similar ones made since then in localities widely separated, both from that in which he worked and from each other.
What we said of the preservation of animal remains we repeat as applicable, in an even higher degree, to that of human remains, in débris so found; it is possible only as the result of a conjunction of favoring circumstances that must be comparatively very rare. And yet many such instances are on record. As early as 1825, Ami Boul, from the loess of the Lahr region in the Breisgau, discovered a human skeleton, and two years afterward a human skull,[2] with bones of the mammoth and other diluvial animals, from the loess at Eguisheim, near Colmar. The study of the deposit in which the latter of these two discoveries was made, with the relative positions of the remains themselves, and the chemical analyses of them by Dr. Scheurer-Kestner, of Thann, leave no room for doubt that the man and the animals were synchronous, both in life and in the deposition of their remains.
And many localities yield human bones and implements mingled with remains of diluvial animals, especially of the mammoth, the rhinoceros of the species previously described, and the cave-bear. Especially rich in these combined relics are caves of Lenu and Sombrive, in the department of Ariége, France, and of Engihoul and Engis, near Lüttich (Liège), Belgium. The contents of the latter two
