Yet men devoted to scientific truth laboured on; and in 1828
Tournal, of Narbonne, discovered in the cavern of Bize specimens
of human industry, with a fragment of a human skeleton, among
bones of extinct animals. In the following year Christol
published accounts of his excavations in the caverns of Gard; he
had found in position, and under conditions which forbade the
idea of after-disturbance, human remains mixed with bones of the
extinct hyena of the early Quaternary period. Little general
notice was taken of this, for the reactionary orthodox
atmosphere involved such discoveries in darkness.
But in the French Revolution of 1830 the old
politico-theological system collapsed: Charles X and his
advisers fled for their lives; the other continental monarchs
got glimpses of new light; the priesthood in charge of education
were put on their good behaviour for a time, and a better era began.
Under the constitutional monarchy of the house of Orleans in
France and Belgium less attention was therefore paid by
Government to the saving of souls; and we have in rapid
succession new discoveries of remains of human industry, and
even of human skeletons so mingled with bones of extinct animals
as to give additional proofs that the origin of man was at a
period vastly earlier than any which theologians had dreamed of.
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