To Charles Lyell 7 October 1860

My dear Lyell,

Forgive me the little delay in replying to your letter. My house has been (as usual) upside down with our Horticultural Show the past week, & I have hardly got to rights again. I heartily wish we had been together at Amiens. Don't consider me oversceptical, or prejudiced against an hypothesis which would ascribe a pre-Adamite origin to the Haches. I am fully prepared to admit such a conclusion, but I am anxious to see all objections (reasonable objections) removed. From what I observed at Abbeville & Amiens, I could not satisfy myself of the absolute necessity of considering the gravel, at the spots where the Haches are found, of such vast antiquity as would imply a pre-Adamite origin for these implements. I do not see why the circumstances to which the peculiar character of this gravel may (I think) very possibly be due, may not have occurred within a period that would still leave some hundreds of years for the surface to have assumed its present character, long before the Romans dug their graves in it. At Amiens the deposit appeared to me purely freshwater, tho' at Abbeville it seems marine shells are intermixed with freshwater, as though the tide formerly came much higher up than at present. Until I got on the top of the chalk range a few miles from Amiens I did not understand how completely this dominates the gravel. It seemed to me extremely likely that the district was once a lake, & that the gravel which had accumulated had been afterwards subjected to most violent disturbance & redeposited locally (where the Haches are found) in a most rapid & confused manner. I have not had time yet to throw my memoranda together - but I hope to put my impressions into the form of 2 or 3 letters to the Athenaeaum - not with the view of acting Champion to a post-Adamite version but simply to suggest matter for enquiry which it seems to me possible which may have a more or less important bearing on the age of this gravel, so different in its character from any that I have ever met with though your vast experience may have shown you the like elsewhere. I found that Mons. Garnier had pretty much the same ideas as myself of the gravel. He walked with me just before I left Amiens as far as Bove, & we discussed the matter as fully as my little experience would permit. But I should have liked a month's further investigation of the environs. I did not see any thing in the bones to satisfy me they might not be (& indeed the reverse) much older than the origin of the Haches. I was some little time in getting rid of the idea that many of the Haches were not of the workmanship of 1860 - their surfaces are so fresh. But I was fully satisfied at last of their being genuine, from observing stalactite encrustation & dendrites upon them exactly as on equally fresh looking surfaces of the fractured flints in situ. Still I have a notion that the workmen do sometimes help a conveniently shaped flint to assume the required form. Indeed, one of the men with whom I struck up an intimacy - said that "formerly" such had been fabricated, but "Je vous prie" that such is not the case "aujourd'hui". Whether he mentally reserved this confession for that very day I don't know, it is so impossible to trust these people. However, that genuine Haches have been found by thousands is sufficiently evident from the strange aglomeration of "good & evil" in Mons. de Perthes' collection! What a mass of absurdity surrounding Oases of marvels! I twice visited the pits round Abbeville, & then staid [sic] 8 days at Amiens - made an excursion with a French friend as far as Notre Dame de Liesse to see the Churches and Chateaux of that district - &, to my great surprise crossed the channel to & fro without sickness.

We had a capital day for our Show last Wednesday, & wound up with the manoeuvres of the Hadleigh Volunteers & the music of their Band, to the great delight of the Hitchamites. Excuse this very hasty scrawl.

Kind regards to Lady Lyell & believe me

Very sincerely

J. S. Henslow

P.S. I suppose it is useless asking you to look at my specimens here??