28 i ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



subsequently the contents of the cave, were exhumed and removed to 

 London. They an- understood to embrace some 1,500 fossil specimens, 

 many of them still imbedded in the calcified mud, in which they were 

 found beneath a coating of stalagmite. The cavern is in a Jurassic 

 limestone, and the soil found in it is formed by the superposition of 

 several layers, viz : first, a stalagmite deposit ; then an osseous breccia ; 

 then black clay beds repeated several times, in the midst of which was 

 a. pell mellof wrought flints of all known shapes ; barbed arrow-points ; 

 bones of carnivores, ruminants, and birds, and rounded pebbles. 

 Mingled with these were the bones of man. About 80 per cent of the 

 animal bones found were those of the reindeer, an animal which has 

 not been known within the historic period south of the northern 

 shores of the Baltic. There were besides, the bones of two species 

 of extinct deer, a few remains of the red deer, the extinct Bos primi- 

 ffcnins, the Rhinoceros tichorinus, and the humerus of a big bird, on 

 which Avas roughly sculptured different parts of a fi^h. This seems to 

 have been an amulet or ornament. Some of the other bones, also were 

 rudely carved, while most of them bear marks of having been frac- 

 tured for the purpose of getting at the marrow, or making them into 

 weapons or instruments. 



At a meeting of the Royal Society, June, 1864, Prof. Owen mi- 

 nutely described the circumstances under which these discoveries were 

 made, and stated that the contemporaneity of the human remains 

 with those of the extinct and other animals with which they were as- 

 sociated, together with the flint and bone implements, was proved by 

 the evidence of the plastic condition of the calcified mud of the brec- 

 cia at the time of interment, by the chemical constitution of the hu- " 

 man bones, corresponding with that of the other animal remains, and 

 by the similarity of their position and relations in the surrounding 

 breccia. Among the principal remains of the men of the flint period 

 discovered in this cave he described the following : 



The hinder portion of a cranium, with several other parts of the 

 same skeleton, which were so -situated in their matrix as to indicate 

 that the body had been interred in a crouching posture, and that, 

 after the decomposition and dissolution of the soft parts, the skeleton 

 had yielded to the superincumbent weight ; *2. An almost entire cal- 

 varium, which was described and compared with different types of the 

 human skull, and which Prof. Owen showed Avas superior in form and 

 capacity to the Australian type, and more closely to correspond Avith 

 the Celtic type, though proportionally shorter than the modern Celtic 

 and the form exhibited by the Celtic cranium from Engis, SAvitzer- 

 land ; o. JaAvs and teeth of individuals of different ages. 



After noticing other smaller portions of human crania, the lower 

 jaw and teeth of an adult, the upper and loAver jaws of immature 

 individuals Avere described, the characters of certain deciduous 

 teeth being referred to. The proportions of the molars are not 

 those of the Australian, but of other races, and especially those 

 of ancient and modern ICnropeans. As in most primitive or 

 early races iu which mastication Avas little helped by arts of cookery, 

 or by various and refined kinds of food, the croAvns of the molars, 

 are Avorn doAvn, beyond the enamel, flat and smooth to the stumps, 

 exposing there a central tract of osteodentine without any signs of 

 decay. 



