ns was called
to it, they dismissed it summarily with a reference to the Deluge of
Noah; but the specimen was labelled, the circumstances regarding it were
recorded, and both specimen and record carefully preserved.

In 1723 Jussieu addressed the French Academy on The Origin and Uses of
Thunder-stones. He showed that recent travellers from various parts of
the world had brought a number of weapons and other implements of stone
to France, and that they were essentially similar to what in Europe had
been known as "thunder-stones." A year later this fact was clinched into
the scientific mind of France by the Jesuit Lafitau, who published
a work showing the similarity between the customs of aborigines then
existing in other lands and those of the early inhabitants of Europe. So
began, in these works of Jussieu and Lafitau, the science of Comparative
Ethnography.

But it was at their own risk and peril that thinkers drew from these
discoveries any conclusions as to the antiquity of man. Montesquieu,
having ventured to hint, in an early edition of his Persian Letters,
that the world might be much older than had been generally supposed,
was soon made to feel danger both to his book and to himself, so that in
succeeding editions he suppressed the passage.

In 1730 Mahudel presented a paper to the French Academy of Inscriptions
on the so-called "thunder-stones," and also presented a series of plates
which showed that these were stone implements, which must have been used
at an early period in human history.

In 1778 Buffon, in his Epoques de la Nature, intimated his belief that
"thunder-stones" were made by early races of men; but he did not press
this view, and the reason for his reserve was obvious enough: he had
already one quarrel with the theologians on his hands, which had cost
him dear--public retraction and humiliation. His declaration, therefore,
attracted little notice.

In the year 1800 another fact came into the minds of thinking men in
England. In that year John Frere presented to the London Society of
Antiquaries sundry flint implements found in the clay beds near
Hoxne: that they were of human make was certain, and, in view of the
undisturbed depths in which they were found, the theory was suggested
that the men who made them must have lived at a very ancient geological
epoch; yet even this discovery and theory passed like a troublesome
dream, and soon seemed to be forgotten.

About twenty years later Dr. B