328 Chronicles of Science. . [April, 
do so. M. Chausse, Conducteur of Ponts et Chaussées, has made 
excavations at Pontil, and forwarded to M. Gervais the greater part of 
the objects of human origin found there, with particulars of their 
bedding and mode of preservation compared with those of the-extinct 
animals embedded with the rhinoceros, The great extinct beasts, 
including the Bos primigenius, are thus shown to be in a lower bed 
than those deposits which have yielded the bones of horse, human 
débris, and the remains of ancient fires, a flint-knife and various 
instruments made of deer’s horn and bone exactly like those of the 
first period of the Swiss Lake dwellings and met with in the Kjokken- 
moddens of Denmark. Moreover, with these was obtained an upper 
maxillary of a young Bos primigenius, corresponding to one of like age 
from Lunel-Viel, with which it was compared. In the same cavern in 
the uppermost sediments, were the tusks of the wild boar, and axes of 
polished stone, such as are considered to be characteristic of the Second 
Stone Age ; and further manufactured objects indicative of the Age of 
Bronze, have also been obtained. The cavern of Roque was discovered 
by Boutin, and the bones from thence were some years since shown to 
M. Gervais, who then requested search to be made for worked flints, 
of which, indeed, a considerable quantity has subsequently been found 
associated with human remains. M. Gervais has also secured a meta- 
tarsal of the cave-bear. The broken bones in this cavern belong to 
deer, common ox, and to an animal indicated by M. Boutin in his 
notice as a goat, of which we may form some conception by supposing 
it to have exceeded the dimensions of living goats as much as the Bos 
primigenius exceeded living oxen. M. Gervais provisionally names it 
the Capra primigenia. MM. Gervais’ conclusions from the above facts 
are, that the first appearance of man in the districts of the caverns of 
Bize, Saint-Pons, Pondres, and La Roque, although they must be 
assigned to a period prior to the records of history, cannot yet be 
admitted to have been, in this region at least, contemporaneous with 
the existence of those extinct animals to which Cuvier made allusion 
when thirty years ago he repelled the statements of Tournal, Christol, 
and Marcel de Serres as to the simultaneous entombment of men and 
the extinct mammalia in these caverns. The importance of the dis- 
tinctions marking the particular faunas which have disappeared, and 
the chronology of these extinctions become, under such reasonings, 
topics exceedingly evident, and their value in attempts at determining 
the contemporaneousness of the human remains and relics with the 
other objects with which they are found must not hereafter be over- 
looked. 
In the Colonies the study of Geology has of late years gained many 
active students, and we are glad to find in the ‘ Transactions of the 
Nova Scotian Institute, only very recently established, Geological 
papers of considerable merit. Mr, Belt’s remarks on some recent 
movements of the earth’s surface have a tone of interest for us we 
could scarcely have expected, and refer much to the mother-country 
and its continental offshoot—the vast island of the Pacific Ocean. 
The subjects that formed the basis of his paper are chiefly the raised 
beaches on the shores of the British Channel, described by Mr. Godwin- 
