in Caves in the South of France, 30 



Cculurciy M. Delpon has particularised nearly five-hundred " del- 

 men,'" and a large number of tumuli. 



But it is not to the Gallic or Gallo-Roman period alone to 

 which we are able to refer the habitation of the caverns of the 

 country now under consideration ; for it was a practice neces- 

 sarily kept up in the manners of a nation exposed to the disor- 

 ders of the almost perpetual wars in which it was engaged for 

 more than ten centuries, during the successive invasions of the 

 Goths, the Saracens, the Franks, the Normans, and the English. 

 We find indeed, a proof to this effect nearly as authentic as that 

 of Florus, six hundred years after that historian. Eginhard in- 

 forms us (Annal. de Gestis Car. magni, an. 767.) that the king Pe- 

 pin, after a protracted contest with the Aquitanians and the Was- 

 cons, made himself master of the greater number of the castles, 

 rocks and caverns in which the subjects of Waifre, last Duke of 

 Aquitania, defended themselves : Castella nmlta, et petras, at- 

 que speluncas, in quibus se Jiostium manus plurima defendebat, 

 capit. (D. Bouquet, Recueil des Hist, de France, t. v. p. 207.) 



We find in the department of Lot, numerous traces of caverns 

 which have been inhabited and fortified at different periods : 

 M. Delpon has described several in his interesting statistical ac- 

 count of that department. This practice of living in subter- 

 ranean abodes for a time or permanently, has by no means ceased 

 in our provinces, for, upon the banks of the lioire alone, fifteen 

 to twenty thousand families of the departments of Loire et 

 Cher, Indre et Loire, and Maine et Loire, have no other habi- 

 tation but caverns formed in the hills of tufaceous chalk. 



But to confine our attention to the caverns containing human 

 bones which occur in the South of France, and even supposing 

 them to belong to the most distant period of history, the argu- 

 ment which MM. Marcel de Serrcs and Tournal have believed 

 themselves entitled to draw from the coarseness of the manufac- 

 tured objects discovered, and one whidi would assign them an 

 antiquity beyond the historical epoch, does not afford the same 

 conclusion to M. Desnoyers. Observations made with accuracy, 

 and a part of the objects of art discovered by M. T. 'J'eissier in 

 the Cavern of Mialet, near Anduze (a lamp and a small figure 

 of baked clay, and copper bracelets), indicate, almost be3'ond 

 doubt, the Gallo-Roman period ; while the careful examination 

 of the human skulls has demonstrated them to be of the Cau- 



