The first person to verify the geological age of the flint-implement strata of the valley of the Somme was Dr. Rigollet, who in 1854 published his “Mémoire sur des Instruments en silex trouvés à Saint Acheul près Amiens, et considérés sous les rapports Géologique et Archéologique,” illustrated by five sections of the beds oy M. Dutilleux, and with drawings of the worked flints. After stating that on many occasions the bones and teeth of fossil elephants had been met with in the same beds, he adds—“My curiosity was strongly excited in the month of August last (1854), when M. Dutilleux, Member of the Society of Antiquaries of Picardy, informed me that he had found there also axes or instruments of flint evidently worked by the hand of man. This fact, however astonishing, was the less so as M. Boucher de Perthes had announced the like discoveries at Menchecourt and at the mill at Quignon, near the gates of Abbeville.

Feeling that these discoveries supported the statements of M. de Perthes, Dr. Rigollet thought the geological question the most important, and the first to be investigated.