We were correcting the final proofs of this work when the learned review Mondes, edited by Abbé Moigno, brought us the news of the discovery that Monsieur de Perthes had just made of a fossil human jaw. We shall report the account that Monsieur de Quatrefages gave of it to the Academy of Sciences at its session of Monday, April 20, 1863, and which Monsieur Moigno summarizes in the following manner in the issue of April 23.
—Monsieur de Quatrefages takes the floor with keen animation to announce the event of the day, the discovery, at Abbeville, of the first human fossil. We shall first publish the official record of the findings in which Monsieur de Quatrefages took part with one of our celebrated friends, Monsieur Carpenter; we shall then analyze his reading.
“Abbé Bourgeois, professor of philosophy and natural history at the college of Pont-Levoy, who came to Abbeville on the 10th of the present April; Doctor Carpenter, vice-president
of the Royal Society of London; Doctor Félix Garrigou, member of the Geological Society of France, and Doctor Falconer, member of the Royal Society of England and of the Geological Society of London, who arrived on the 14th; Monsieur de Quatrefages, member of the Institute, professor of anthropology at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, who arrived on the 15th, have unanimously confirmed the opinion of the members of the Society of Emulation and declared that this jaw was fossil, that it was a human jaw, and that it presented differences from the present race. These gentlemen, after having verified the bank and the place from which Monsieur Boucher de Perthes had removed the fossil jaw, recognized that this bank was virgin, or undisturbed, and that the fossil origin of this jaw presented no doubt. On the 14th, Doctor Falconer and Doctor Garrigou; on the 15th, Monsieur de Quatrefages; on the 16th, Monsieur Buteux of Abbeville and Monsieur Brady of London, in their turn removed flint axes from the diluvial layer of black sand resting upon the chalk.
“Monsieur de Perthes discovered on the same day, in the layer of yellow sand of the same bank, three and a half meters from the surface, two fragments of bone that Messieurs Falconer and de Quatrefages immediately recognized as pieces of a mammoth tooth (Elephas primigenius). Finally, Monsieur Boucher de Perthes, in a mass of bones that he collected at Menchicourt in the first days of April, at a depth of eight meters in Monsieur Dufour’s sandpit, noticed a fragment of a human jaw and six detached teeth, which, despite their appearance of freshness, Doctor Falconer declared, pending a fuller examination with which he was going to occupy himself, to be fossil teeth, and certainly human, but belonging to a race closer to ours than the jaw of Moulin-Quignon. Monsieur de Quatrefages was present.
“Monsieur Boucher de Perthes, in his book Diluvial Antiquities, said in 1847 that one day these antediluvian hatchets, then so rare and in which no one believed, would be found everywhere. This prediction has been verified. He added that it would be the same with human fossils; we are tempted to believe that here again Monsieur Boucher de Perthes predicted correctly. But what struck us above all is that he had also announced that, when this fossil man was found, he would present, like all the other antediluvian mammals, some difference of conformation from present individuals. The form of the jaw of the fossil man of Moulin-Quignon appears once again to prove him right.”
Monsieur de Quatrefages affirms that the jaw has not been rolled, and that it has not come from far away. At first sight, one might believe in some characteristic signs of a distinct race: indeed, the horizontal branch and the ascending branch form an extremely open angle with one another; the fourth molar, which alone remains, is slightly inclined; finally, a groove or channel is observed upon the jaw. But, on looking closely, these three peculiarities are found in a certain number of jaws of present races, and the incisors are implanted perpendicularly, as in the most frankly orthognathous races, or which are in direct relation with the primitive race. The Negro race is essentially a prognathous race, which could not have numbered the white race among its ancestors; it is perhaps likewise with the white race, in the sense that the primitive race is intermediate between the white race and the Negro race. Monsieur de Quatrefages, assisted by Monsieur Pruner-Bey, compared the jaws of Abbeville with the jaws found by Monsieur de Vibraye in the cave of Arcy and by Monsieur Lartet in the cave of Aurignac, and he concluded from this comparison that these three specimens presented numerous points of resemblance with one another, with slight differences. The Abbeville jaw, one of whose teeth had been destroyed by caries, belonged to an aged individual, of small stature or of a stature barely equal to the average; it is rather weak than strong, and presents nothing ferocious, nothing that justifies the opinion that man issued from the ape.
Monsieur de Quatrefages often repeats that what is at issue here is still only a first glimpse; that he in no way claims to affirm that fossil man has really been found; that he recuses himself completely with regard to the geological question; that he knows perfectly well that geologists are divided over the antiquity of these deposits of sands, of these diluvium, etc… It is easy to foresee that this first success will soon bring others; but, says the learned professor of anthropology in conclusion, whatever scientific riches may be brought to light, it would be a crying injustice to forget that it is to the ardent convictions, to the indefatigable perseverance of Monsieur Boucher de Perthes, that this double discovery of the axes and of fossil man will have been owed—one of the most important, assuredly, that the natural sciences can make.