Chapter 38

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

THE PROFESSOR IN HIS CHAIR AGAIN

To understand this apostrophe of my uncle's, made to absent Frenchsavants, it will be necessary to allude to an event of highimportance in a palæontological point of view, which had occurred alittle while before our departure.

On the 28th of March, 1863, some excavators working under thedirection of M. Boucher de Perthes, in the stone quarries of MoulinQuignon, near Abbeville, in the department of Somme, found a humanjawbone fourteen feet beneath the surface. It was the first fossil ofthis nature that had ever been brought to light. Not far distant werefound stone hatchets and flint arrow-heads stained and encased bylapse of time with a uniform coat of rust.

The noise of this discovery was very great, not in France alone, butin England and in Germany. Several savants of the French Institute,and amongst them MM. Milne-Edwards and de Quatrefages, saw at oncethe importance of this discovery, proved to demonstration thegenuineness of the bone in question, and became the most ardentdefendants in what the English called this 'trial of a jawbone.' Tothe geologists of the United Kingdom, who believed in the certaintyof the fact - Messrs. Falconer, Busk, Carpenter, and others -scientific Germans were soon joined, and amongst them the forwardest,the most fiery, and the most enthusiastic, was my uncle Liedenbrock.

Therefore the genuineness of a fossil human relic of the quaternaryperiod seemed to be incontestably proved and admitted.

It is true that this theory met with a most obstinate opponent in M.Elie de Beaumont. This high authority maintained that the soil ofMoulin Quignon was not diluvial at all, but was of much more recentformation; and, agreeing in that with Cuvier, he refused to admitthat the human species could be contemporary with the animals of thequaternary period. My uncle Liedenbrock, along with the great body ofthe geologists, had maintained his ground, disputed, and argued,until M. Elie de Beaumont stood almost alone in his opinion.

We knew all these details, but we were not aware that since ourdeparture the question had advanced to farther stages. Other similarmaxillaries, though belonging to individuals of various types anddifferent nations, were found in the loose grey soil of certaingrottoes in France, Switzerland, and Belgium, as well as weapons,tools, earthen utensils, bones of children and adults. The existencetherefore of man in the quaternary period seemed to become daily morecertain.

Nor was this all. Fresh discoveries of remains in the pleioceneformation had emboldened other geologists to refer back the humanspecies to a higher antiquity still. It is true that these remainswere not human bones, but objects bearing the traces of hishandiwork, such as fossil leg-bones of animals, sculptured and carvedevidently by the hand of man.

Thus, at one bound, the record of the existence