in Caves in the South of France, 303 



bones, and the objects of human manufacture occurring with 

 them, have been placed in the situations in which they have been 

 discovered, at a period subsequent to the last great cataclysms, 

 and that they are not cotemporaneous with the extinct species 

 of quadrupeds with which they are associated. The first argu- 

 ment he brings forward to support his view of the subject, is de- 

 duced from a passage in Florus, an historian of the early part of 

 the second century. 



Florus relates that Caesar ordered the crafty inhabitants of 

 Aquitania to be inclosed in the caverns to which they had re- 

 tired ; in this, following a custom common to many tribes of the 

 Celtic race, who sought in these subterraneous retreats, not only 

 a refuge in time of war, but also a shelter from cold, magazines 

 for their corn, for the produce of the chase and fishing, and on 

 more than one occasion a place of concealment for the animals 

 reduced to a domestic state. The Gauls had also, according to 

 Caesar, great skill in subterranean excavations for the search of 

 iron and marl ; but the text of Florus is much more applicable 

 to our subject : " Aquitani, callidum gemts^ in speluncas se red- 

 piebanty Caesar Jussit includi.'" {Florus, Hist. Rom. Epit. L. 3. 

 C. 10). These unfortunate Aquitanians must in part have 

 perished in these caverns, and by means of the water which pe- 

 netrated their bones must subsequently have become blended 

 with the mud, the gravel, and the debris of the animals already 

 buried in some of them and probably at a much earlier period. A 

 stalagmitic paste would then in some places, as at Bise, cement 

 the whole into solid aggregates ; viz., the bones of the bear and 

 the deer, some inferior layers with human bones, the fragments 

 of earthenware vessels, terrestrial shells, the bones of the ani- 

 mals of modern times, and some black mud of the surface. The 

 irregular lowering of the vault would on certain points produce 

 a contact, and an equal adherence of the various deposits to the 

 walls of the rock. 



This explanation is so much the more. natural, from the con- 

 sideration of the circumstance, that the examination of many 

 caverns shows (even without speaking of the fact of " eboule- 

 mens" which are so often observed in such situations) the evi- 

 dent marks of different streams of water separated by intervals 

 of dryness, beds of ossiferous gravel alternating occasionally so 



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