I visited Thenay, the most celebrated of these three localities, in 1877, and had the advantage of studying the question there under the guidance of the late Abbé Bourgeois, the discoverer of the flints, and one of the most prominent advocates of the Tertiary man. This was the year before he died, and he showed me at the time his complete collection, and gave me several of the objects he had discovered. Geologists are agreed in assigning the deposits in which they occur to the lower Miocene or middle Tertiary period, which restricts the discussion to the character of the flints themselves. The accompanying woodcut[FA] gives some indication of their appearance, although it is misleading, because the long figure resembling a flint knife is intended to represent a solid nucleus. None of these objects, however, ought to be called "flints flakes," as very few, if any, flakes showing the "bulb of percussion," always seen upon them, have been discovered in the Tertiary deposits at Thenay,[FB] although I have found them there myself _upon the surface_. The three other figures would be classed by archæologists as "piercers," as Bourgeois has himself designated them, and are also solid objects. Many of the Thenay flints exhibit a "crackled" appearance, due to the action of heat. On this account Mortillet maintains that they were splintered by fire, and not formed by percussion, the usual method by which flint implements were fabricated in the stone age. The Thenay objects are all of very small dimensions, and are so absolutely unlike the large, rudely-chipped axes of the Chellean type, found in so many different parts of the world, and generally accepted as the implement used by Palæolithic man, that the question naturally suggests itself, What could have been the purpose for which these little implements were employed? No better answer has been suggested than the ludicrous one that they were used by the hairy anthropopithecus to rid himself of the vermin with which he was infested. [Footnote FA: From Le Conte, _op. cit._, p. 608. The figures are copied from Gaudry, who borrowed them from the article by Bourgeois, _Congrès Internat. de Bruxelles_, 1872, p. 89, pl. ii; and from his _La Question de l'Homme Tertiare_. Revue des Questions Scientifiques, 1877, p. 15.] [Footnote FB: Le Préhistorique, p. 91.]