II. It was not till 1823 that Amy Boué gave Cuvier some human bones which he had found in the _loess_ of the Rhine, near Lahr, in the Duchy of Baden. Boué regarded these bones as fossils. Cuvier refused to admit this conclusion. He has often been reproached with this, but the reproach is unjust. Cuvier had too often seen pretended _fossil men_ change either into mastodons or salamanders, or even into simple contorted blocks of sandstone, not to be on his guard, and, in presence of a fact hitherto unique, he thought it wiser to admit a disturbance which would have carried into the loess bones of much later date than that of the formation of this layer. But Cuvier, whatever may have been said of him, never denied the possibility of the discovery of _fossil men_. He has, on the contrary, formally admitted the existence of our species as anterior to the latest revolutions of the globe. “Man,” he says, “may have inhabited some country of small extent from which he repeopled the earth after these terrible events.” We see that the praises and reproaches which have been addressed to our great naturalist on account of an opinion which he never held, are equally undeserved. The reserve, perhaps exaggerated, which Cuvier imposed upon himself, and the confidence which was placed in him, weighed heavily upon science by impeding the comprehension of the value of observations made by Tournal (1828-1829) in L’Aude, by Christol (1829) in Le Gard; by Schmerling (1833) in Belgium; by Joly (1835) in Lozère; by Marcel de Serres (1839), in L’Aude, and by Lund (1844) in Brazil. In 1845 almost all the savants, properly so called, shared the opinion so well stated by Desnoyers. Without regarding the existence of fossil man as impossible, they did not think that the discovery had as yet been made. It is to the persevering efforts of a distinguished archæologist, Boucher de Perthes, that we owe the proof of a fact so long denied, and now universally admitted. Under the influence of certain philosophical ideas, little calculated to procure him followers, he had admitted _à priori_ the existence of human beings anterior to the present man, from whom they must have differed considerably. He hoped to find either their remains themselves, or the products of their industry, in the upper alluvial deposits. Watching either himself or through his agents the excavation of the gravel-pits near Abbeville, he collected there a number of flints, more or less rudely worked, but bearing the unmistakable impress of the hand of man. Some of his publications (1847) brought him visitors, who in their turn carried on the search. Soon after, M. Regollot (1855) and M. Gaudry (1856) obtained from the gravel of Saint Acheul hatchets similar to those of Abbeville, and declared themselves convinced. The English savants, Falconer, Prestwich, and Lyell, after having visited the collection of Boucher de Perthes, did the same, and had many imitators.