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 Antiquités Celtiques and
Antédiluviennes," 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