152 BONES IN THE CAVE OF ARCY. CHAP. ix. 



cavern occurs in Jurassic limestone, at a slight elevation 

 above the Cure, a small tributary of the Yonne, which last 

 joins the Seine near Fontainebleau, about forty miles south 

 of Paris. The lowest formation in the cavern resembles the 

 ( diluvium gris ' of Paris, being composed of granitic ma 

 terials, and like it derived chiefly from the waste of the 

 crystalline rocks of the Morvan. In it have been found the 

 two branches of a human lower jaw with teeth well-pre 

 served, and the bones of the Elephas prim.igenius, Rhinoceros 

 tichorhinus, Ursus spelceus, Hycena spelcea, and Cervus 

 Tarandus, all specifically determined by M. Lartet. I have 

 been shown this collection of fossils by M. de Vibraye, and 

 remarked that the human and other remains were in the 

 same condition and of the same colour. 



Above the grey gravel is a bed of red alluvium, made up 

 of fragments of Jura limestone, in a red argillaceous matrix, 

 in which were embedded several flint knives, with bones of 

 the reindeer and horse, but no extinct mammalia. Over 

 this, in a higher bed of alluvium, were several polished 

 hatchets of the more modern type called f celts,' and above all 

 loam or cave-mud, in which were Grallo-Eoman antiquities.* 



The French geologists have made as yet too little progress 

 in identifying the age of the successive deposits of ancient 

 alluvium of various parts of the basin of the Seine, to enable 

 us to speculate with confidence as to the coincidence in date 

 of the granitic gravel with human bones of the Grrotte d'Arcy 

 and the stone- hatchets buried in ' grey diluvium ' of La Motte 

 Piquet, before mentioned ; but as the associated extinct mam 

 malia are of the same species in both localities, I feel strongly 

 inclined to believe that the stone hatchets found by M. Grosse 

 at Paris, and the human bones discovered by M. de Vibraye, 

 may be referable to the same period. 



* Bulletin de la Societe Greologique de France, 1860. 



