In days nearer our own the roost cultivated people accepted the remains
of a gigantic batrachian[4] as those of a man who had witnessed the
flood, and it was the same with a tortoise found in Italy scarcely
thirty years ago. Dr. Carl, in a work published at Frankfort[5] in
1709, took up another theory, and, such was the general ignorance
at the time, he used long arguments to prove that the fossil bones
were the result neither of a freak of nature, nor of the action of
a plastic force, and it was not until near the end of his life that
the illustrious Camper could bring himself to admit the extinction
of certain species, so totally against Divine revelation did such a
phenomenon appear to him to be.

Prejudices were not, however, always so obstinate. For more than three
centuries stones worked by the hand of man have been preserved in the
Museum of the Vatican, and as long ago as the time of Clement VIII. his
doctor, Mercati, declared these stones to have been the weapons of
antediluvians who had been still ignorant of the use of metals.

During the early portion of the eighteenth century a pointed black
flint, evidently the head of a spear, was found in London with the
tooth of an elephant. It was described in the newspapers of the day,
and placed in the British Museum.

In 1723 Antoine de Jussieu said, at a meeting of the ACADEMIE DES
SCIENCES, that these worked stones had been made where they were found,
or brought from distant countries. He supported his arguments by an
excellent example of the way in which savage races still polish stones,
by rubbing them continuously together.

A few years later the members of the ACADEMIE DES INSCRIPTIONS in