Note 6 — Chapter I · The Stone Age: its Duration and its Place in Time.

A few years later the members of the Académie des Inscriptions in their turn, took up the question, and Mahudel, one of its members, in presenting several stones, showed that they bad evidently been cut by the hand of man. “An examination of them,” he said, “affords a proof of the efforts of our earliest ancestors to provide for their wants, and to obtain the necessaries of life.” He added that after the re-peopling of the earth after the deluge, men were ignorant of the use of metals. Mahudel’s essay is illustrated by drawings, some of which we reproduce (Fig. 1), showing wedges, hammers, hatchets, and flint arrow-beads taken, he tells us, from various private collections.6