thing of the mammoth in the flesh from the Siberian specimens—his up-curved tusks, concave forehead, and long mane-this chef d'œuvre of the troglodyte artist would never have commanded the admiration with which we must now regard this savage huntsman's rude but vigorous effort to translate, with the point of a sharp flint, his observation of the animal into a permanent record of the zoology of his time-an expression of noble endeavour not unworthy of the greatest living genius.

From the quantities of coal and cinders in these French caverns, it may be safely assumed that their occupants inhabited them permanently, and kept up their fires; for the climate which suited the reindeer would render a warm shelter in winter absolutely necessary to man. Consequently, though hunters, they were not nomads. Great as must have been the interval of time between the Moustier and Cro-Magnon race and the people of the Madelaine-represented by the erosion of the river-bed eighty-five feet-we must remember that the mammoth was still living, when a cave, now only some fifteen feet above the present highest flood level, was tenanted by man. Between that last period and our day, then, the lapse of time must have been enormous as compared with the historical era, for history nowhere carries us back to the age of the mammoth; yet the most modern of these troglodytes had not entered the Neolithic period-the period of polished weapons, of pottery, of agriculture, and of textile manufactures-itself to be followed by the period of metals, which brings us to the dawn of history.

A general survey of the British caverns in Devonshire, Yorkshire, and Derbyshire leads to the following main conclusions:-That man was contemporary in Britain with the mammoth, reindeer, rhinoceros, cave bear, lion, hyæna, etc.; that he was in the unpolished stone age; that he was a hunter; that he made no pottery; and that he had not attained to the skill in ornamentation, much less reached the artistic standard exhibited by the cave men of France. Many of the bone weapons are excellent in design and finish, notably the harpoon from Kent's Cavern ; but the British troglodyte had either no leisure or no artistic promptings. Nevertheless, it would not be safe to conclude, from the ordinary specimens of his work which we do possess, that extraordinary efforts were not made by some individuals, even superior to the engraving of the head and fore quarters of a horse, on the portion of a rib of some animal, which was found recently in Robin Hood's Cave, Creswell Crags, Derbyshire. Britain has not hitherto furnished any Palæolithic sepulchre, like that of Cro-Magnon, with complete, or nearly complete skeletons and skulls of both sexes; and the best British human fossil-the portion of an upper jaw containing four teeth, from Kent's Cavern-would not justify any anatomical determination of its position in the zoological history of man. Thus far, at least, we may go. Hermetically sealed in stalagmite, deposited on the floor of the cavern by water dripping from the roof, this jaw lay below the remains of extinct mammals; while beneath all were bone and stone implements of human workman

ship, equally firmly fixed in a natural limestone cement. Intermixture of these relics was precluded by the nature of the deposit continually forming over them and sealing them in a matrix of crystalline limestone, and there can be no doubt that their order of superposition corresponds with a chronological succession, which would give to the implements and bones of man an antiquity at least equal to that of the rhinoceros, cave bear, mammoth, etc., if not greater. Many successive generations of men probably lived here and fed upon the animals whose charred and broken bones lie scattered over the different layers of the floor, associated with charcoal, flint flakes, weapons, etc., and long periods may have elapsed during which the cave was the resort only of bears, hyænas, and lions. Perhaps that human jawbone was carried there by one of these large carnivora. Teeth-marks characteristic of the hyena, on the bones of herbivorous animals, testify abundantly to his having made this a lair.

Although the west of England has afforded the clearest evidence of man's co-existence with the extinct fauna of the British Islands, the same conclusion may be drawn from the cave deposits of other localities.

In endeavouring to arrive at some estimate of the interval between the era of the Devonshire cave men and the present day, Mr. William Pengelly compares the physical features of the district in the troglodyte period with those it presents now. These lead him to the conclusion that the valleys of Ilsham and Brixham have been scooped out sixty feet and a hundred feet

caves.

respectively since the last fluviatile deposit was left in the Still more suggestive, perhaps, of the long lapse of time are the human remains in the submerged forestbeds at Pentuan, and at Carnon in Falmouth harbour. Everything here points to very slow subsidence of the forests, the stumps of the trees being frequently in a vertical position, and gradual accumulation above them of a mass of detrital matter regularly stratified. In the process of mining for tin these deposits were passed through, and human skulls were found in one case about forty feet below the surface, and in another still lower in the forest-bed itself. This very considerable change of level in the west of England had been already completed when Diodorus Siculus described the district-a few years after the Christian era-in terms which would apply exactly to it now. But before then occurred the deposition of from twenty to forty feet of detritus, before that the subsidence of the forest, before that its growth, and during its growth the presence of man in Devonshire as a contemporary with extinct animals, of whose existence the oldest legends and traditions have not preserved the faintest trace, although they must have been objects of special attention to primitive man, and were likely to have survived in tradition had it not been obliterated by the slow lapse of time.

Among other human remains from Engis, Mentone, Bruniquel, Canstadt, etc., the celebrated Neanderthal skull has been an object of special attention to anthropologists. It belongs certainly to the mammoth age, if not earlier, and if it represents a race and not merely