66 IMPLEMENTS OF FLINT AND BONE. CHAP. IV. 



caverns these proportions were exactly reversed, while at 

 Groffontaine skulls of the bear and other parts of the skeleton 

 were found in their natural numerical proportions. Speaking 

 generally, it may be said that human bones, where any were 

 met with, occurred at all depths in the cave-mud and gravel, 

 sometimes above and sometimes below those of the bear, 

 elephant, rhinoceros, hysena, &c. 



Some rude flint implements of the kind commonly called 

 flint knives or flakes, of a triangular form in the cross section 

 (as in fig. 14, p. 118), were found by Schmerling dispersed 

 generally through the cave-mud, but he was too much en 

 grossed with his osteological inquiries to collect them dili 

 gently. He preserved some few of them, however, which I 

 have seen in the museum at Liege. He also discovered in the 

 cave of Chokier, two and a half miles south-west from Liege, a 

 polished and jointed needle-shaped bone, with a hole pierced 

 obliquely through it at the base ; such a cavity, he observed, 

 as had never given passage to an artery. This instrument 

 was embedded in the same matrix with the remains of a 

 rhinoceros.* 



Another cut bone and several artificially shaped flints were 

 found in the Engis cave, near the human skulls before alluded 

 to. Schmerling observed, and we shall have to refer to the 

 fact in the sequel (Chap. VIII.), that although in some forty 

 fossiliferous caves explored by him human bones were the 

 exception, yet these flint implements were universal, and he 

 added that ' none of them could have been subsequently in 

 troduced, being precisely in the same position as the remains 

 of the accompanying animals.' ( I therefore,' he continues, 

 ( attach great importance to their presence ; for even if I had 

 not found the human bones under conditions entirely favour 

 able to their being considered as belonging to the ante- 



* Schmerling, part ii. p. 177. 



