498 ANNUAL, REPOBT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1923 



It must be said that Riviere, whose recent death we mourn, had 

 neither the scientific training nor the necessary genius to prove his 

 case, although it was a worthy one. He was reproached with not 

 having conducted his excavations methodically or with sufficient care, 

 with not having established the stratigraphy of his positions, with 

 having confused the various levels, and with having relied upon the 

 statements of his workmen. The great work which he published in 

 1887 on The Antiquity of Man in the Maritime Alps, poorly planned 

 and inaccurate on important points, was an insufficient reply to these 

 criticisms, and the opinion of G. de Mortillet on the Neolithic age of 

 all the skeletons was generally accepted, accompanied in certain 

 minds, however, by distressing reservations. 



At this point there came upon the scene the Prince of Monaco, 

 whose keen scientific spirit had already long been exercised in the 

 domain of anthropology as well as in many other directions. From 

 his youth, in fact, he had anticipated his later work and had pre- 

 pared for it in the laboratories of Paris, discussing paleontology 

 witli Albert Gaudry, studying prehistoric archeology with G. de 

 Mortillet, and working with Manouvrier on human skeletons. In 

 1882 and 1883 he was engaged in exploring one of the finest caves 

 of the Baousse-Rouss£, the Barma Grande, working himself with 

 his own hands and scrupulously keeping in a notebook the record 

 of his excavations. " The undertaking of the Prince of Monaco," 

 M. de Villeneuve tells us, " has this special characteristic : It con- 

 templates less the assembling of a collection of prehistoric objects 

 than the acquisition on the spot of facts with which in his opinion 

 the laboratory study of the material may be correlated in such a 

 way as to make all the results of an excavation available for science." 



When he was obliged to be away, he charged his archivist, M. 

 Saige, with continuing the investigations and gave him exact in- 

 structions : " No one shall work on the excavations except in your 

 presence * * *. It is essential to establish as exactly as possible 

 the levels in which the various fragments have been found in rela- 

 tion to the absolute surface of the ground, and especially to estab- 

 lish the relations of these different levels to each other. It is neces- 

 sary also to note the thickness and the situation of the sterile 

 strata — that is, those which produce nothing — for they indicate a 

 period during which the cave was abandoned * * *. A diary 

 must also be very carefully kept, so that when the cave has been 

 completely excavated its history may be written." And he indi- 

 cated the manner of working by digging, first, a reconnaissance 

 trench, by following this with horizontal trenches, by sifting the 

 earth, etc. He did not hesitate to go into the most minute technical 



