SKULLS OF NEANDERTHAL.

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minute precautions. We shall have to examine the bones. and other objects which are found there, and determine whether they are buried in a virgin soil which has never been disturbed; since it is on this condition only that we can draw certain conclusions from the facts which have been observed.

CHAPTER III.

THE BONE CAVES.

I. HISTORY OF THE QUESTION.

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EVERY important discovery is generally preceded by partial discoveries which herald or foreshadow its approach. Some fact attracts the attention of an observant mind; another similar fact appears, perhaps simultaneously, perhaps after an interval of greater or less duration; other phenomena of like nature group themselves around the first and this assemblage of scattered gleams produces a ray of light which at length strikes the eyes of all beholders. But the new idea which shines out brilliantly from the surrounding obscurity is nearly always opposed to the reigning opinion which has become, so to speak, an article of scientific, often even of religious faith. Hence arise a strenuous opposition, a more or less passionate strife, until at last the human mind can enjoy its new conquest in peace.

Such is the approximate history of every question which has been the subject of human dispute. That which concerns the synchronism of our species with the great extinct mammals could form no exception to the general law. Proofs of this fact are now abundant; and the bone caves have furnished a contingent which is by no means to be despised.

As early as 1828, Tournal of Narbonne announced to the scientific world the discovery of human remains,' and of things fashioned by the hand of man, in the cave of Bize (Aude) intermixed with bones of animals which

A fragment of the superior maxillary.

MAN AND EXTINCT SPECIES CONTEMPORARY.

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Cuvier himself considered as fossil in every acceptation of the word. This discovery, important in every point of view, was received with a caution which was almost excessive, even on the part of the Institute.

It is true that the proof is not absolutely complete, since the cave of Bize was at one time believed to date only from the time of the reindeer, and, as it was said, contained no remains of the cave bear, nor of the cave hyena, nor of the mammoth, nor of the Rhinoceros tichorhinus, &c., in a word, of none of the great characteristic mammalia of the beginning of the quaternary epoch. But at the present day every serious objection disappears in face of the facts attested by Gervais, that the cave bear and cave hyena do occur at Bize, that he has himself found them there, and that consequently the cave is of more ancient date than was originally believed. We cite the words of the learned professor of the museum, who is known to be as a rule opposed to the theory of the great antiquity of man.

I maintain that the Ursus spelaus and the Hyana spelaa are buried in the same place as man; and that the cave of Bize may be cited as a proof in support of the opinion that our species was the contemporary of these two great carnivora."

Every doubt as to the contemporary existence of man and of extinct species should have disappeared, when on June 29, 1829, M. de Christol, then secretary of the Société d'Histoire Naturelle of Montpellier, submitted to the Institute a paper entitled, 'Notice sur les ossements fossiles des cavernes du département du Gard.' The author of this work, which received at the time less notice than it deserved, after having carefully examined the caves of Pondres and of Souvignargues (Gard), adduced new and conclusive facts in support of those already cited by M. Tournal. He proved incontestably, as we think, that the cave of Pondres, being entirely filled by the diluvium at the time when he visited it, could not have

1 Gervais, Recherches sur l'ancienneté de l'homme et de la période quaternaire, p. 54.

received any substance of modern or foreign origin, which has sometimes happened with certain hollows more easy of access. He showed further that the bones of hyenas and the fragments of pottery which occur there are found at every depth, and that the human remains are in precisely the same geological conditions as all the other bones with which they are associated.'

At Souvignargues M. de Christol dug out of the deepest part of the undisturbed diluvium a humerus, a radius, a fibula, a sacrum, and two vertebræ, which had formed part of the skeleton of an adult of small size, perhaps of a woman, as Professor Dubreuil thinks.

In 1833 Dr. Schmerling explored the numerous caves of Belgium, and in several of them, notably at Engis and at Engihoul, near Liège, he ascertained the existence of skulls and of portions of the human skeleton, together with those of bears, hyenas, elephants, rhinoceroses, &c., lying in the diluvian deposits, sometimes above and sometimes below the remains of these species which are already universally recognised as fossil. Bones and flints shaped by human hands, extracted from the same beds, served to confirm Schmerling in the belief that man was the contemporary of the extinct animal population whose remains he had found.

The conclusion was no doubt logical, and yet it was opposed by several geologists of great authority. Lyell himself did not at first admit it (1833); but more than a quarter of a century later (1860), on the occasion of a visit to the Schmerling collection, and to several of the places whence the specimens it contains were extracted, the famous author of the Principles of Geology' frankly acknowledged and retracted his error, in terms which are still more creditable to his character than to his judgment.

This brings us to 1835, the date at which I, an unknown disciple of science, ventured to maintain that man was perhaps the contemporary of the bears whose remains I had lately found at Nabrigas (Lozère) together with a fragment of pottery of early workmanship, which was

RELIQUIÆ DILUVIANÆ.

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judged worthy by M. Christy to be cast at Toulouse for the purpose of enriching the principal museums of France.1

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My paper, which was published in the Bibliothèque Universelle of Geneva, being the work of an unknown author, attracted very little notice in France, and in spite of the new proofs which it brought forward in support of the theory of the co-existence of man and extinct species, was perhaps for that very reason, forgotten or ranked with those rash assumptions then called juvenile, of which my learned predecessors MM. Tournal and Christol had given me the example. I hope the reader will pardon me this personal allusion, this return towards an already distant past, which recalls to me my early beginnings in science, to which I have with disinterested devotion consecrated the greater part of my life.

In 1838 a work appeared entitled Essais sur les cavernes à ossements et sur les causes qui les y ont accumulés.' After enumerating the different places where either human remains or fragments of human industry have been found, the author, M. Marcel de Serres, concludes by saying: 'It appears then an established fact ... that man was the contemporary of the extinct species whose remains are found scattered in certain of the bone caves of Europe' (p. 198). It is true that, in 1860, Marcel de Serres expressed a very different opinion. 'It appears,' he says, that the true beds of diluvian deposit, also called diluvium, do not contain the least trace of bones, nor of human industry and remains.' 2 At the present day few, if indeed any, geologists share this later opinion of the Montpellier professor.

In England the bone caves had also been eagerly explored, but often without method, and with preconceived ideas. The important work of Dr. Buckland, published in 1823, under the title of Reliquiæ Diluvianæ,' had

I presented one of these casts to the Museum of Natural History at Toulouse.

2 Marcel de Serres: Des espèces perdues, et des races qui ont disparu des lieux qu'elles habitaient primitivement' (Annal. Scient. Naturel., t. xiii. p. 300, 1860).