The tool-bearing drift-gravel of France and England presents its relics of primitive art intermingled with countless amorphous unwrought flints. Both have been subjected to the violent action of floods, to which the present condition of such geological deposits is due; and many contents of the caves, though subjected to less violence, are the results of similar causes. But, along with numerous implements of the rude drift type, the sheltered recesses of the caves have preserved, not only the smaller and more delicate flint implements, but carefully wrought tools and weapons of bone, horn, and ivory. Some, at least, of those undoubtedly belong to the Palæolithic age, and therefore tend to verify conclusions, not only as to the mechanical ingenuity, but also as to the intellectual capacity of the earliest tool-makers. The large almond and tongue-shaped flint implements are so massive as to have effectually resisted the violence to which they, along with other contents of the rolled gravels in which they occur, were subjected; whereas it is only in the favouring shelter of the caves, or in rare primitive sepulchral deposits, that delicate trimmed flakes and the more perishable implements of bone and ivory, or horn, have escaped destruction. The palæolithic implements to which Boucher de Perthes directed attention so early as 1840, were recovered from drift-gravel beds, where amorphous flint nodules, both whole and fractured, abound in countless numbers; and this tended to suggest very reasonable doubts as to the artificial origin of the rude implements lying in close proximity to them. Nor was this incredulity lessened by the significance assigned by him to other contents of the same drift-gravel. For so far was Boucher de Perthes from overlooking the endless variety of fractured pieces of flint recoverable from the drift beds, that his narrative is supplemented by a series of plates of _L’Industrie Primitive_, the larger number of which present chipped flints so obviously the mere products of accidental fracture or of weathering, that they contributed in no slight degree to discredit the book on its first appearance. Others of them, however, show true flakes, scrapers, and fragments probably referable to smaller implements of the same class, such as would be recognised without hesitation as of artificial origin if found alongside of undoubted flint implements in a cave deposit, or in any barrow, cist, or sepulchral urn. In so far as they belong to the true Drift, and not to the Neolithic or the Gallo-Roman period, they tend to confirm the idea that the large almond and tongue-shaped implements are not the sole relics of palæolithic art.