[Footnote C:  Sir C. Lyell, in his remarks before the British Association in 1859, said upon the discovery alluded to here:  “I am reminded of a large Indian mound which I saw in St. Simon’s Island in Georgia,—­a mound ten acres in area, and having an average height of five feet, chiefly composed of cast-away oyster-shells, throughout which arrow-heads, stone axes, and Indian pottery were dispersed.  If the neighboring river, the Altamalia, or the sea which is at hand, should invade, sweep away, and stratify the contents of this mound, it might produce a very analogous accumulation of human implements, unmixed, perhaps, with human bones.”—­Athenaeum, September 21, 1859.]

Such seems in reality to have been the case; though in regard to so important a fact in the history of the world much caution must be exercised in accepting the evidence.  We will state briefly the proofs, as they now appear, of the existence of a race of human beings on this earth in an immense antiquity.

A French gentleman, M. Boucher de Perthes, has for thirty-four years been devoting his time and his fortune, with rare perseverance, to the investigation of certain antiquities in the later geological deposits in the North of France.  His first work, “Les Antiquites Celtiques and Antediluviennes,” published in 1847, was received with much incredulity and opposition; a second, under the same title, in 1857, met with a scarce better reception, and it was with the greatest difficulty that he could induce even the savans of his own country to look at the mass of evidence he had collected on this subject.

He made the extraordinary claim to have discovered a great quantity of rough implements of flint, fashioned by art, in the undisturbed beds of clay, gravel, and sand, known as drift, near Abbeville and Amiens.  These beds vary in thickness from ten to twenty feet, and cover the chalk hills in the vicinity; in portions of them, upon the hills, often in company with the flints, are discovered numerous bones of the extinct mammalia, such as the mammoth, the fossil rhinoceros, tiger, bear, hyena, stag, ox, horse, and others.

The flint implements are found in the lowest beds of gravel, just above the chalk, while above them are sands with delicate fresh-water shells and beds of brick-earth,—­all this, be it remembered, on table-lands two hundred feet above the level of the sea, in a country whose level and face have remained unaltered during any historical period with which we are acquainted.  “It must have required,” says Sir Charles Lyell, “a long period for the wearing down of the chalk which supplied the broken flints (stones) for the formation of so much gravel at various heights, sometimes one hundred feet above the level of the Somme, for the deposition of fine sediment, including entire shells, both terrestrial and aquatic, and also for the denudation which the entire mass of stratified drift has undergone, portions having been swept away, so that what remains of it often terminates abruptly in old river-cliffs, besides being covered by a newer unstratified drift.  To explain these changes, I should infer considerable oscillations in the level of the land in that part of France, slow movements of upheaval and subsidence, deranging, but not wholly displacing the course of ancient rivers.”