308 On the Human Bones, ^cjbund 



previous to the period when the combustion of the dead and of 

 victims was introduced, and anterior to the epoch of the inva- 

 sions of the Franks, the Danes, and the Saxons, all of whom 

 preserved for a long time the Celtic or German manners. 



By such researches the antiquary may render great service to 

 tlie geologist. 



M. Desnoyers has already examined attentively, under an 

 analogous point of view, the rich collection of the coins of Gaul 

 jpreserved at the Royal Library. Upon the most ancient, upon 

 those which were not too evidently a mere imitation of ancient 

 Greek and Roman coins, he found most generally, so far as rude 

 designs admitted of them, representations of animals, and parti- 

 cularly of the wild boar, the horse, the wild bull, and the deer, 

 species which, at that period lived in Gaul, and of which we 

 find the bones under Celtic monuments. Much more rarely he 

 found symbolical or monstrous animals, incorrect representations 

 of birds or of other animals common on Greek coins ; but the 

 most characteristic and the most abundant are the quadrupeds, 

 which, history informs us, were natives of Gaul, and those which 

 were employed as domestic animals by the inhabitants. 



If we should find under the Celtic monuments, bones of the 

 bear, the rhinoceros, or other extinct species, which, on the other 

 hand, we should also find figured on the coins, it is then that 

 we should have the right to conclude for the contemporaneous 

 existence of these animals and the human species, much rather 

 than from their occurring together in caverns, where so many 

 causes may and must have produced such varied changes. No- 

 thing hitherto brought forward contradicts the zoological and 

 geological results established by Cuvier ; and the fruits of the 

 very small number of researches made with this new view, have 

 only presented to us species analogous to living ones. Thus 

 M. Blainville, in an examination of some bones from tumuli 

 and tuguria of the Gallo-Belgic oppidum (Cite de Limes), in 

 the environs of Dieppe, recognised no extinct species among the 

 six or seven species he examined. The animals found were, 

 the dog, the pig, the deer, the sheep, the ox, &c. 



According to these various considerations, and other histori- 

 cal evidence adduced by M. Desnoyers, the human bones of ca- 

 verns, which themselves are of different ages, appear to him to 

 be of no earlier origin than the period of the Gauls and Celt?, 



