the earliest inhabitants of the islands of the Seine were contemporary with the mammoth, the cave-bear, the auroch, and the rhinoceros with cleft nostrils. [Illustration: FRAGMENT OF ROMAN AQUEDUCT, STILL IN EXISTENCE, ON THE PROPERTY OF M. RASPAIL, AT ARCUEIL.] It is not to be supposed, however, that these very ancient texts are read without the necessary stumbling over obscure passages and much upsetting of cherished historical truth. The finest presentations of ancient records that we find in grave historians are now set aside by learned archæologists in communications to the _Académie des Sciences à Paris_ or the _Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres_. Even the original number of islands in the Seine and Cæsar's statements concerning the Gauls and their manners and customs are now disputed. When it comes to the origin of things and of peoples, the erudition is profound. M. G. de Mortillet proposes for the epoch _quaternaire_ or _pléistocène_ four successive divisions,--in their order of antiquity, the _Chelléen_, the _Moustérien_, the _Solutréen_, and the _Magdalénien_; M. Perrier du Carne thinks that the traces of the Solutré and of the Madeleine show them to have been derived from two races long contemporary on the same soil, of which the former were autochthonous and the latter, immigrants, who came in with the reindeer and followed him when he retreated northward. M. Piette objects to the word _Magdalénien_, and proposes to replace it by _glyptique_, for, during this period, man learned to carve bones with flint instruments; after the _Solutré_ he places the epoch _Eburnéenne_, and after that, the _Tarandienne_, characterized by instruments in reindeer's horns. After the quaternary period, Professor Alexandre Bertrand, of the École du Louvre, places the _Mégalithiques_, whom he thinks belonged to the great ethnological family of the Touranians which preceded the Aryans in Europe, and who erected the great stone monuments, dolmens, menhirs, cromlechs, etc., formerly called druidical, found in various parts of Europe. Several of these _monuments mégalithiques_ have been discovered in Paris and its environs,--a street of the Faubourg du Temple owes its name of Pierre-Levée (raised stone) to the fact that at its opening, in 1782, an enormous ancient rock was found artificially supported on two others, the funerary tumulus, or mound, which formerly covered it having disappeared.