wide at one end, and a little more than one inch wide at the other.
Around the opening intended to receive the stone, a line has been
drawn by way of ornament. The axe is of grayish silex, polished along
its whole length, and is three inches long, and one inch and a half
wide. At the upper end of the case, broken remains of a large
wild boar’s tusk were firmly driven into the horn; while the axe itself
was very loose, and seems always to have been so — the looseness
being increased by its smooth polish. I t was evidently intended to
be thrown, or detached from the case, whenever a blow was struck
with it. The handle of this axe was twenty inches long, made of
oak, and in a tolerable state of preservation; but became reduced one-
half in drying, by crumbling and splitting off in flakes. Carelessly
worked, it had been hardened at both ends in the fire. This was the
only wooden handle found — some being of bone, and many others
entirely decomposed.
Pig. 205 was an axe-case and axe similar in most respects to Pig.
204, except its handle of horn.
A great variety of other instruments, made of deer’s horn, occurred
in this and other alluvial excavations; but as our main concern
is with those of higher antiquity, we must pass them by without
notice, and proceed to the diluvian vestiges.
In the gravel-pits of Menchecourt, on the Somme, M. de Perthes
found a number of stone axes and other works, associated with the
remains of extinct animals. The character of this formation is marked
by erratic blocks and the organic remains which it contains: the
erratic blocks being here represented by boulders of sandstone, and
by massive flints, which have been visibly rolled and rounded, despite
of their weight. Its organic remains are chiefly those of the
elephant, the rhinoceros, hippopotamus, bear, hyena, stag, ox, urus,
and other mammalia, of races either extinct or foreign to the present
climate, belonging to the diluvian epoch. In the post-diluvian
or alluvial formations already spoken of, only living or indigenous
species are met with; and the human bones are mixed with scoriae,
worked metals, pieces of pottery, and other vestiges of the civilization of
the period to which these buried men belonged. The alluvia, whatever
be the materials which compose them, are easily recognized through
the horizontal position of their beds. Such regular stratifications do
not exist in the Diluvial formations. Here different sands, gravels,
marls, broken and rolled flints, everywhere scattered in disturbed
beds, and repeated at irregular distances, announce the movement
of a great mass of water and the devastating action of a furious current.
Indeed it is scarcely possible to be deceived in the diluvial
cnaracter of these formations, or to confound them with a posterior
deposit. Everything announces the diluvial origin of these beds at
Menchecourt : the total absence of modern relics and of any remains
of recent animals; the large lumps of silex; the scattered boulders;
the pure sands (yellow, green, and black), sometimes in distinct layers,
at other times mixed with the silex whose couches, descending to a great
depth, rise again immediately to the surface of the soil. Such is the
character of these formations; wherein we meet at every step the traces
of an immense catastrophe, especially in valleys where the diluvian
waters had precipitated the ruins accumulated in their course.*
M. Bâillon, speaking of this locality, says : —
“ We begin to find bonea at the depth of ten or twelve feet, in the gravel of Menchecourt ;
but they are more plentiful at eighteen or twenty feet deep. Among them are bones which
were bruised and broken before they were entombed, and others whose angles have been
rounded by friction in water ; but neither of these are found as deep as those which remain
entire. These last are deposited at the bottom of the gravel bed ; they are whole, being
neither rounded nor broken, and were probably articulated at the time of their deposition.
I found the whole hind'leg of a rhinoceros, the bones of wkich were still in their proper
relative position. They must have been connected by ligaments, and even covered with
muscles, at the time of their destruction. The rest of the skeleton of the same animal lay
at a small distance. I have remarked that whenever we meet with bones disposed in this
manner that is to say, articulated — we also find that the sand has formed a hard agglomeration
against on© side of them.”
Subjoined is a list of tbe mammifers discovered by M. Bâillon in the
sands of Menchecourt : namely, elephant, rhinoceros, fossil horse (of
medium size and more slender form than the living species), felis
spelea, canis speleus, hyena, bear, stag, and bos hombifrons of Harlan.
A scale from the neck of a great crocodile was also exhumed from
gravel of Menchecourt, being only the third instance in which traces
of that saurian had been found, thus associated, in Europe : once at
Brentford in England, once in the diluvial beds of the Yal d’Arno,
and once at Menchecourt. t
We have said that, among these diluvian remains, (amid hones of
elephants, rhinoceroses, and crocodiles, under many beds of sand and
gravel, and at a depth of several feet below the modern soil,) vestiges
of human industry had been met with; and we now give a section of
the locality (Eig. 106) from which flint axes, agglutinated with a mass
of bones and sand, were procured. These axes were taken from the
ossiferous beds ; one at four and a half metres, or nearly thirteen feet,
and the other at nine metres, or about twenty-seven feet, below the
surface. The character of the soil and of the superposed layers of
compact sand, free from any appearance of modem detritus, forbids
a supposition that they could ever have reached such a depth through
accident since the formation of the bed itself, or by any infiltration from
* Boucher de Perthes ; p. 217-246. + Cuvier : Ossemens Fossiles.