gan a thorough search in the Tertiary
limestone hills, and found multitudes of chipped stone implements, some
of them, indeed, of original forms, but most of forms common in other
parts of the world under similar circumstances, some of the chipped
stone axes corresponding closely to those found in the drift beds of
northern France.

All this seemed to show conclusively that, long ages before the earliest
period of Egyptian civilization of which the monuments of the first
dynasties give us any trace, mankind in the Nile Valley was going
through the same slow progress from the period when, standing just above
the brutes, he defended himself with implements of rudely chipped stone.

But in 1881 came discoveries which settled the question entirely.
In that year General Pitt-Rivers, a Fellow of the Royal Society and
President of the Anthropological Institute, and J. F. Campbell, Fellow
of the Royal Geographical Society of England, found implements not only
in alluvial deposits, associated with the bones of the zebra, hyena, and
other animals which have since retreated farther south, but, at Djebel
Assas, near Thebes, they found implements of chipped flint in the hard,
stratified gravel, from six and a half to ten feet below the surface;
relics evidently, as Mr. Campbell says, "beyond calculation older than
the oldest Egyptian temples and tombs." They certainly proved that
Egyptian civilization had not issued in its completeness, and all at
once, from the hand of the Creator in the time of Mena. Nor was this
all. Investigators of the highest character and ability--men like Hull
and Flinders Petrie--revealed geological changes in Egypt requiring
enormous periods of time, and traces of man's handiwork dating from
a period when the waters in the Nile Valley extended hundreds of feet
above the present level. Thus was ended the contention of Mr. Southall.

Still another attack upon the new scientific conclusions came from
France, when in 1883 the Abbe Hamard, Priest of the Oratory, published
his Age of Stone and Primitive Man. He had been especially vexed at the
arrangement of prehistoric implements by periods at the Paris Exposition
of 1878; he bitterly complains of this as having an anti-Christian
tendency, and rails at science as "the idol of the day." He attacks
Mortillet, one of the leaders in French archaeology, with a great
display of contempt; speaks of the "venom" in books on prehistoric man
generally; complains that th