But M. Desnoyers only brought forward proofs of a single kind, and such as are not appreciated at their full value until we are used to them. Thus his work was at first received with a certain amount of distrust. He was asked to produce, if not pliocene man himself, at least some objects of his industry, and, in particular, the weapons which would enable him to attack, and the knives with which he could cut up the elephant and rhinoceros, or the great deer, whose bones all bear the marks of more or less deep incision which he attributes to man. M. l’Abbé Bourgeois soon replied to these demands, and in the presence of the worked flints which he placed before competent judges, all doubt disappeared. Unfortunately, the gravel of Saint-Prest is considered by a sufficient number of geologists to belong rather to quaternary deposits, which are more recent than undoubted tertiary formations. It ought probably to be placed in the period of transition which separates two distinct epochs. Perhaps it is contemporaneous with the deposit of the Victoria cave in Yorkshire, from which Tiddeman extracted a human fibula, and which this naturalist regarded as having been formed a little before the great glacial cold. In short, the discoveries of MM. Desnoyers and Tiddeman take back the existence of man to the confines of the tertiary period. The discoveries in Italy take us still further. On different occasions, and since 1863, some Italian savants thought that they had discovered in undoubted pliocene deposits traces of human industry, and even human bones. These results were, however, for different reasons successively doubted and rejected by the most competent judges. But M. Capellini has just discovered, in 1876, clearer proofs of man’s existence in pliocene times in the clay deposits of Monte Aperto, near Sienne, and in two other places. The eminent professor of Bologna has found in these localities, the age of which is not contested, bones of the balœnotus bearing numerous deep incisions, which it seems to me could only have been produced by the action of a cutting instrument. In some cases the bone has been broken off upon one of the faces of incision, whilst the other is smooth and sharply defined. Judging from woodcuts and casts, it is impossible to avoid admitting that the cuts have been made upon fresh bones. These incisions differ entirely from those found upon the bones of halitherium found in the miocene falunian strata of Pouancé. I have always thought it impossible to attribute the latter to man, as decidedly as I think those which we are now discussing ought to be attributed to his agency. The existence of pliocene man in Tuscany is, then, in my opinion, an acquired scientific fact. Nevertheless, I should admit that this conclusion is not yet unanimously accepted, and that it is disputed by M. Magitot, among others, who relies upon his own experience.