In chronology, all that is proved by these discoveries of M. Lartet is that the fossil animals mentioned above and man were contemporaries on the earth.  The age of each must be determined inferentially by comparing the age of strata in which these animals are usually found with the age in which the most ancient traces of man are discovered,—­such as the deposits already described in the North of France.

Similar discoveries on a smaller scale are recorded by Mr. Prestwich in Suffolk, England, and in Devonshire.  We are informed also by Sir C. Lyell of a recent important discovery near Troyes, France.  In the Grotto d’Arces, a human jaw-bone and teeth have been found imbedded with Elephas primigenius, Ursus spelaeus, Hyaena spelaea, and other extinct animals, under layers of stalagmite.  Professor Pictet, the celebrated geologist, who also gives his adhesion to these discoveries of M. de Perthes, states that the cave-evidence has by no means been sufficiently valued by geologists, and that there are caverns in Belgium where the existence of human remains cannot be satisfactorily explained on the theory of a modern introduction of them.  The President of the British Association (Lord Wrottesley) also states that in the cave of Brixham, Devonshire, and in another near Palermo, in Sicily, flint implements were observed by Dr. Falconer, in such a manner as to lead him to infer that man must have coexisted with several lost species of quadrupeds.

Professor Owen, in his “Palaeontology,” (1861,) appears to put faith in the genuineness and antiquity of these flint relics.  He also states that similar flint weapons have been found by Mr. John Frere, F.R.S., in Suffolk, in a bed of flint gravel, sixteen feet below the surface, of the same geological age as that in the valley of the Somme.

The conclusion from these discoveries—­the most important scientific discoveries, relating to human history, of modern times—­is, that ages ago, in the period of the extinct mammoth and the fossil bear, perhaps before the Channel separated England from France, a race of barbarian human beings lived on the soil of Europe, capable of fabricating rough implements.  The evidence has been carefully weighed by impartial and experienced men, and thus far it seems complete.

The mind is lost in astonishment, in looking back at such a vast antiquity of human beings.  A tribe of men in existence tens of thousands of years before any of the received dates of Creation! savages who hunted, with their flint-headed arrows, the gigantic elk of Ireland and the buffalo of Germany, or who fled from the savage tiger of France, or who trapped the immense clumsy mammoth of Northern Europe.  Who were they? we ask ourselves in wonder.  Was there with man, as with other forms of animal life, a long and gradual progression from the lowest condition to a higher, till at length the world was made ready for a more developed human being, and the Creator