f this year, 1898, by an enterprising proprietor on the edge of
the forest of Fontainebleau, of the site of a prehistoric pottery on his
grounds. This locality, opposite the village of Ecuelle, was already
noted for the menhir, or prehistoric upright stone, standing on the
right bank of the canal. The ancient potteries seem to have occupied a
space about five hundred metres in length and two hundred in width; at
the depth of sixty-five or seventy centimetres below the surface there
is found "a black sand, burned, beaten down, trodden, which gives forth
a resonant sound when attacked by the pick-axe; this arises from the
fact that it has been, through a long series of centuries, tormented by
the incessant passage of men and the innumerable fires of the furnaces."
From the specimens of pottery extracted from this sand, it is concluded
that this manufactory had been maintained from the Neolithic age down to
the Gallo-Roman period. In the little village of La Mouthe, in the
department of the Dordogne, farther south, have been discovered within
the last few years, in a cavern, very curious and not unskilful outline
drawings on the rock, sometimes touched up with color, of now extinct
animals,--the extreme age of these works of art being demonstrated by
the fact that they are in many cases partially covered with stalactites.
The learned scientists who have uncovered and photographed these incised
drawings conclude, from their appearance and from the fragments of
animals' bones found in the cavern, that they are the work of men of the
Neolithic age and the Palaeolithic, which preceded it. In short, there is
every reason to believe, on the strength of all the testimony which
modern science has wrested from the unwilling records of the past, that
the earliest inhabitants of the islands of the Seine were contemporary
with the mammoth, the cave-bear, the auroch, and the rhinoceros with
cleft nostrils.

[Illustration: FRAGMENT OF ROMAN AQUEDUCT, STILL IN EXISTENCE, ON THE
PROPERTY OF M. RASPAIL, AT ARCUEIL.]

It is not to be supposed, however, that these very ancient texts are
read without the necessary stumbling over obscure passages and much
upsetting of cherished historical truth. The finest presentations of
ancient records that we find in grave historians are now set aside by
learned archaeologists in communications to the _Academie des Sciences a
Paris_ or the _Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres_. Even the
original n