"That is a queer bone," he said to himself. "I wonder what animal it
belonged to. It is too big to have been the bone of a horse or a cow.
It is big enough to have belonged to an elephant. Well, no matter what
it came from," he said, throwing it aside, "it is neither sand nor
gravel, so it is nothing to me."
As he dug on, he threw out some rudely shaped stones.
"These are queer, too," he said, "but they will not sell for gravel."
And away went the stones from his shovel.
That evening a learned man from Paris, the most beautiful city of
France, was walking beside the river and looking at the sunset clouds
in sky and water.
There in the pit lay the big bones. He saw them. Forgotten were
clouds and sky! He knew that he was looking at the bones of some
animal long since gone from the earth! For years after that, he
watched the work in the gravel pits and carried away any bones and
shaped stones that were dug out. He studied them and found that some
of the bones were those of the mammoth, and that there were bones of
the rhinoceros too.
At last he showed the bones and the stones to the learned men in Paris,
and said, "These stones are very old; they are as old as the ground in
which they lay. They were shaped by men who knew very little and had
very little, and who used them for weapons. Near the stone weapons
were these bones of the mammoth and the rhinoceros.
Pages:
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67