to arrive at Abbeville. MM. Gaudry and Pouchet themselves extracted
hatchets from the Quaternary deposits of the Somme.[17] These facts
were vouched for by the well-known authority, M. de Quatrefages,
who had already constituted himself their advocate. All that was now
needed was the test of a public discussion, and the meeting of the
Anthropological Society of Paris supplied a suitable occasion. The
question received long and searching scientific examination. All doubt
was removed, and M. Isidore Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire was the mouth-piece
of an immense majority of his colleagues, when he declared that the
objections to the great antiquity of the human race had all melted
away. The conversion of men so illustrious was followed of course by
that of the general public, and, more fortunate than many another,
Boucher de Perthes bad the satisfaction before his death of seeing a
new branch of knowledge founded on his discoveries, attain to a just
and durable popularity in the scientific world.

It must not, however, be supposed that popular superstition yielded
at once to the decisions of science, and it is curious to meet with
the same ideas in the most different climates, and in districts
widely separated from each other:[18] Everywhere worked flints are
attributed to a supernatural origin; everywhere they are looked upon
as amulets with the power of protecting their owner, his house or his
flocks. Russian peasants believe them to be the arrows of thunder,
and fathers transmit them to their children as precious heirlooms. The
same belief is held in France, Ireland, and Scotland, in Scandinavia,
and Hungary, as well as in Asia Minor, in Japan, China, and Burn lap;
in Java, and amongst the people of the Bahama Islands, as amongst
the negroes of the Soudan or those of the west coast of Africa,[19]
who look upon these stones as bolts launched from Heaven by Sango,
the god of thunder; amongst the ancient inhabitants of Nicaragua as