62 DESNOYERS ON HUMAN AND OTHER CAVE BONES. CHAP. iv. 



future life. But in none of these ancient monuments have 

 any bones been found of the elephant, rhinoceros, hyaena, 

 tiger, and other quadrupeds, such as are found in caves, 

 which might certainly have been expected, had these species 

 continued to flourish at the time that this part of Gaul was 

 inhabited by man.'* 



After giving no small weight to the arguments of M. Des- 

 noyers, and the writings of Dr. Buckland on the same subject, 

 and visiting myself several caves in Germany, I came to the 

 opinion that the human bones mixed with those of extinct 

 animals, in osseous breccias and cavern mud, in different 

 parts of Europe, were probably not coeval. The caverns 

 having been at one period the dens of wild beasts, and having 

 served at other times as places of human habitation, worship, 

 sepulture, concealment, or defence, one might easily conceive 

 that the bones of man and those of animals, which were 

 strewed over the floors of subterranean cavities, or which 

 had fallen into tortuous rents connecting them with the 

 surface, might, when swept away by floods, be mingled in 

 one promiscuous heap in the same ossiferous mud or 

 breccia.f 



That such intermixtures have really taken place in some 

 caverns, and that geologists have occasionally been deceived, 

 and have assigned to one and the same period fossils which 

 had really been introduced at successive times, will readily 

 be conceded. But of late years we have obtained convincing 

 proofs, as we shall see in the sequel, that the mammoth, and 

 many other extinct mammalian species very common in caves, 

 occur also in undisturbed alluvium, embedded in such a 

 manner with works of art, as to leave no room for doubt 

 that man and the 'mammoth coexisted. Such discoveries have 



* Desnoyers, Bulletin de la Societe Universelle d'Histoire Naturelle. Pa- 

 Geologique de France, torn. ii. p. 252 ; ris, 1845. 

 and article on Caverns, Dictionnaire t Principles, 9th ed. p. 740. 



