CHAP. iv. DR. SCHMERLING ON LIEGE CAVERNS. 67 



diluvian epoch, proofs of man's existence would still have 

 been supplied by the cut bones and worked flints.' * 



Dr. Schmerling, therefore, had no hesitation in concluding 

 from the various facts ascertained by him, that man once 

 lived in the Liege district contemporaneously with the cave- 

 bear, and several other extinct species of quadrupeds. But 

 he was much at a loss when he attempted to invent a 

 theory to explain the former state of the fauna of the region 

 now drained by the Meuse ; for he shared the notion, then 

 very prevalent among naturalists, that the mammoth and the 

 hysenaf were beasts of a warmer climate than that now 

 proper to Western Europe. In order to account for the 

 presence of such ' tropical species,' he was half-inclined to 

 imagine that they had been transported by a flood from some 

 distant region ; then again he raised the question whether 

 they might not have been washed out of an older alluvium, 

 which may have pre-existed in the neighbourhood. This last 

 hypothesis was directly at variance with his own statements, 

 that the remains of the mammoth and hysena were identical 

 in appearance, colour, and chemical condition with those of 

 the bear and other associated fossil animals, none of which 

 exhibited signs of having been previously enveloped in any 

 dissimilar matrix. Another enigma which led Schmerling 

 astray in some of his geological speculations was the supposed 

 presence of the agouti, a South-American rodent, 'proper 

 to the torrid zone.' My friend M. Lartet, guided by Schmer- 

 ling's figures of the teeth of this species, suggests, and I have 

 little doubt with good reason, that they appertain to the 

 porcupine, a genus found fossil in post-pliocene deposits of 

 certain caverns in the south of France. 



In the year 1833, I passed through Liege, on my way to 

 the Ehine, and conversed with Dr. Schmerling, who showed 



* Schmerling, partii. p. 179. t Ibid, part ii. pp. 70, 96. 



F 2 



