To the evidence from fossiliferous beds was added evidence from old river-gravels and limestone caverns. The relics extracted from the stalagmitic deposits in Kent's Hole, near Torquay, had lain unheeded for some years save as "curios," when M. Boucher des Perthes saw in the worked flints of a somewhat rougher type which he found mingled with the bones of rhinoceroses, cave-bears, mammoths, or woolly-haired elephants, and other mammals in the "drift" or gravel-pits of Abbeville, in Picardy, the proofs of man's primitive savagery, so far as Western Europe was concerned. The presence of these rudely-chipped flints had been noticed by M. de Perthes in 1839, but he could not persuade savants to admit that human hands had shaped them, until these doubting Thomases saw for themselves like implements _in situ_ at a depth of seventeen feet from the original surface of the ground. That was in 1858: a year before the publication of the Origin of Species. Similar materials have been unearthed from every part of the globe habitable once or inhabited now. They confirm the speculations of Lucretius as to a universal makeshift with stone, bone, horn, and such-like accessible or pliable substances during the ages that preceded the discovery of metals. Therefore, the existence of a Stone Age at one period or another where now an Age of Iron (following an Age of Bronze) prevails, is an established canon of archæological science. From this follows the inference that man's primitive condition was that which corresponds to the lowest type extant, the Australian and Papuan; that the further back inquiry is pushed such culture as exists is found to have been preceded by barbarism; and that the savage races of to-day represent not a degradation to which man, as the result of a fall from primeval purity and Eden-like ease, has sunk, but a condition out of which all races above the savage have emerged.