28 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



guarded as Buch &\ Hebron by a Mohammedan mosque, which 

 only the children of the faith and no infidel can pass. 



U, markable vestiges of the cave-life of antiquity may be seen 

 Ln the rock-hewn city of Petra in Edom, some fifty miles south of 

 the I > ad Sea. The valley in which it stood is lined on either side 

 with the remains of tombs, temples, and perhaps habitations, 

 excavated oui of the rock. These structures are supposed to date 

 from a remote antiquity. In later times they were faced with 



dtectural fronts of a more or less imposing character. They 

 are believed to have been used chiefly as places of burial. But 

 there is reason to suppose that most of them were originally in- 

 tended and used as habitations. Many of the chambers have no 

 resemblance to tombs, but are such as a primitive race would 

 construct to live in. Most of these have closets and recesses suit- 

 able for family uses, and many have windows in front, which 

 would be superfluous in tombs. It may be that in the course of 

 time, as customs and people changed, these chambers were aban- 

 doned for other houses, to be subsequently used as places of 

 sepulture. 



Evidences are found in caves the world over of their use by 

 1 in historic men from the stone ages down so frequently as to 

 indicate that they were at one or more periods the usual dwell- 

 ings of the race, and archaeologists have based upon them the 



or types of cave-men. The evidences of human abode are 

 often found mingled with traces of animals, some of extinct spe- 

 cies, which seem to have shared man's occupancy or contested 

 w i t h him for it, or to have possessed the caves alternately with, 

 hiin. They have furnished fruitful fields for archaeological and 

 geological research, and the excavation of them has afforded valu- 

 able information concerning the condition and surroundings of 

 the most primitive men, and incidentally as to the age in which. 

 tiny lived. The most noted localities where the earlier finds of 

 ancient stone implements were made in France were habitations 

 of cave-dwellers or in the immediate vicinity of such, habitations, 

 and the science of palaeolithic archaeology was thus based in its 

 beginning upon the relics left by men of this type. In Kent's 

 I in, Torquay, which was one of the first of these palaeolithic 

 abodes to be studied in England, human bones or articles of 

 human manufacture have been found in two or three different 

 strata, the oldest ones under conditions betokening extreme an- 

 tiquity and in company with the remains of animals that were 



act long before the historical period. The first discoveries 



were among the earliest evidences that were obtained of 



man's having had a greater antiquity than had till then been 



ibed to him, and were received incredulously by a public 

 which the thought struck as contradictory to revelation. The 



