ude flint hatchets in a sand-bed containing
remains of mammoth and rhinoceros at Menchecourt near Abbeville, which
first find was followed by others in the same district (see Boucher de
Perthes, _De l'Industrie primitive, ou les arts a leur origine_ (1846);
_Antiquites celtiques et antediluviennes_ (Paris, 1847), &c.). Between
1850 and 1860 French and English geologists were induced to examine into
the facts, and found irresistible the evidence that man existed and used
rude implements of chipped flint during the Quaternary or Drift period.
Further investigations were then made, and overlooked results of older
ones reviewed. In describing Kent's Cavern (q.v.) near Torquay, R.A.C.
Godwin-Austen had maintained, as early as 1840 (_Proc. Geo. Soc.
London_, vol. iii. p. 286), that the human bones and worked flints had
been deposited indiscriminately together with the remains of fossil
elephant, rhinoceros, &c. Certain caves and rock-shelters in the
province of Dordogne, in central France, were examined by a French and
an English archaeologist, Edouard Lartet and Henry Christy, the remains
discovered showing the former prevalence of the reindeer in this region,
at that time inhabited by savages, whose bone and stone implements
indicate a habit of life similar to that of the Eskimos. Moreover, the
co-existence of man with a fauna now extinct or confined to other
districts was brought to yet clearer demonstration by the discovery in
these caves of certain drawings and carvings of the animals done by the
ancient inhabitants themselves, such as a group of reindeer on a piece
of reindeer horn, and a sketch of a mammoth, showing the elephant's long
hair, on a piece of a mammoth's tusk from La Madeleine (Lartet and
Christy, _Reliquiae Aquitanicae_, ed. by T.R. Jones (London, 1865),
&c.).

This and other evidence (which is considered in more detail in the
article ARCHAEOLOGY) is now generally accepted by geologists as carrying
back the existence of man into the period of the post-glacial drift, in
what is now called the Quaternary period, an antiquity at least of tens
of thousands of years. Again, certain inferences have been tentatively
made from the depth of mud, earth, peat, &c., which has accumulated
above relics of human art imbedded in ancient times. Among these is the
argument from the numerous borings made in the alluvium of the Nile
valley to a depth of 60 ft., where down to the lowest level fragments of
burnt brick and pott