Man is ice to truth;
But fire to lies.


One of the masters of modern science, Cuvier, has said[14]: "Everything
tends to prove that the human race did not exist in the countries
where the fossil bones were found at the time of the convulsions
which buried those bones; but I will not therefore conclude that man
did not exist at all before that epoch; he may have inherited certain
districts of small extent whence he re-peopled the earth after these
terrible events." Cuvier's disciples went beyond the doctrines of
their master. He made certain reservations; they admitted none, and
one of the most illustrious, Elie de Beaumont, rejected with scorn the
possibility of the co-existence of man and the mammoth.[15] Later,
retracting an assertion of which perhaps he himself recognized the
exaggeration, he contented himself with saying that the district where
the flints and bones had been collected belonged to a recent period,
and to the shifting deposits of the slopes contemporary with the peaty
alluvium. He added -- scientific passions are by no means the least
intense, or the least deeply rooted -- that the worked flints may
have been of Roman origin, and that the deposits of Moulin-Quignon may
have covered a Roman road! This might indeed have been the case in the
DEPARTEMENT DU NORD, where a road laid down by the conquerors of Gaul
has completely disappeared beneath deposits of peat, but it could not
be true at Moulin-Quignon, where gravels form the culminating point
of the ridge. Moreover, the laying down of the most ancient peats
of the French valleys did not begin until the great watercourses had
been replaced by the rivers of the present day; they never contain,