France, favored beyond all other countries by the men of the Old Stone Age, was destined to become the classic centre of prehistoric archæology. As early as 1740 Mahudel(18) published a treatise upon stone implements and laid the foundations both of Neolithic and Palæolithic research. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the problem of fossil man had awakened wide-spread interest and research. In Buckland's(19) _Reliquiæ diluvianæ_, published in 1824, the great mammals of the Old Stone Age are treated as relics of the flood. In 1825 MacEnery explored the cavern of Kent's Hole, near Torquay, finding human bones and flint flakes associated with the remains of the cave-bear and cave-hyæna, but the notes of this discovery were not published until 1840, when Godwin-Austen(20) gave the first description of Kent's Hole. In 1828 Tournal and Christol(21) announced the first discoveries in France (Languedoc) of the association of human bones with the remains of extinct animals. In 1833-4 Schmerling(22) described his explorations in the caverns near Liége, in Belgium, in which he found human bones and rude flint implements intermingled with the remains of the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the cave-hyæna, and the cave-bear. This is the first published evidence of the life of the Cave Period of Europe, and was soon followed by the recognition of similar cavern deposits along the south coast of Great Britain, in France, Belgium and Italy. [Illustration: FIG. 3. Three great types of flint implements. _A._ An eolith of accidental shape. _B._ A palæolith of Chellean type, partly fashioned. _C._ A Neolithic axe head, partly polished. After MacCurdy.] The work of the caveman, gradually revealed between 1828 and 1840, is now known to belong to the closing period of the Old Stone Age, and it is very remarkable that the next discovery related to the very dawn of the Old Stone Age, namely, to the life of the 'river-drift' man of the Lower Palæolithic.