Elements of geology, or, The ancient changes of the earth and its inhabitants as illustrated by geological monuments / by Sir Charles Lyell.

  • Lyell, Charles, Sir, 1797-1875.
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Elements of geology, or, The ancient changes of the earth and its inhabitants as illustrated by geological monuments / by Sir Charles Lyell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

    138/822 (page 116)
    This inference, though questioned for a time, was soon confirmed by- fresh observations made by Dr. Rigollot, at Amiens, and all doubts were finally cleared up in 1859, by Mr. Prestwich, who found a flint tool in situ in the same stratum at Amiens that contained the remains of extinct mammalia. Geologists were, moreover, better prepared to accept such proofs of the coexistence of man with the ancient fauna in consequence of the more exact data obtained from the exploration of the Brixham cave in 1860, to be mentioned in the sequel. The flint implements found at Abbeville and Amiens are most of them considered to be hatchets and spear-heads, and are different from those commonly called “ Celts.” These celts, so often found in the recent formations, have a more regular oblong shape, the result of grinding, by which also a sharp edge has been given to them. The Abbeville tools found in gravel at different levels, as in Nos. 3 and 4, fig. 106., in which bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, and other extinct mammalia occur, are always unground, having evidently been brought into their present form simply by the chipping off of fragments of flint by repeated blows, such as could be given by a stone hammer. Some of them are oval, others of a spear-headed form, no two exactly alike, and yet the greater number of each kind are obviously fashioned after the same general pattern. Their outer surface is often white, the original black flint having been discoloured and bleached by exposure to the air, or by the action of acids, as they lay in the gravel. They are most commonly stained of the same ochreous colour as the flints of the gravel in which they are em- bedded. Occasionally their antiquity is indicated not only by their colour but by superficial incrustations of carbonate of lime, or by dendrites formed of oxide of iron and manganese. The edges also of most of them are worn, either by having been used as tools, or by having been rolled in the river’s bed. They are usually found at depths of from 15 to 25 feet from the surface, in gravel, covered by loam, and most of them near the bottom of the gravel, and not far from its contact with the subjacent chalk. They are met with not only in the lower-level gravels, as in No. 3, fig. 106., but also in No. 4, or the higher gravels, as at St. Acheul, in the suburbs of Amiens, where the old alluvium lies at an elevation of about 100 feet above the level of the river Somme. At both levels fluviatile and laud- shells are met with in the loam as well as in the gravel, but there are no marine shells associated, except at Abbeville, in the lowest part of the gravel, near the sea, and a few feet only above the present high-water mark. Here with fossil shells of living species are mingled the bones of Elephas primigenius and E. antiquus, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, Hippopotamus, Felis spela:a, Hycena spelccu, reindeer, and many others, the bones accompanying the flint imple- ments in such a manner as to show that both were buried in the old alluvium at the same period. Nearly the entire skeleton of a rhinoceros was found at one point, narntdy, in the Meuchecourt drift at Abbeville, the bones being in