CHAP. x. DISCOVERY OF HUMAN BONES. 183 



matter, e, such as the rain may have washed down the slope 

 of the hill. In that year a labourer named Bonnemaison, 

 employed in repairing the roads, observed that rabbits, when 

 hotly pursued by the sportsman, ran into a hole which they 

 had burrowed in the talus, at i /, fig. 25. On reaching as far 

 into the opening as the length of his arm, he drew out, to 

 his surprise, one of the long bones of the human skeleton ; and 

 his curiosity being excited, and having a suspicion that the 

 hole communicated with a subterranean cavity, he commenced 

 digging a trench through the middle of the talus, and in a 

 few hours found himself opposite a large heavy slab of rock 

 / h, placed vertically against the entrance. Having removed 

 this, he discovered on the other side of it an arched cavity, a, 

 seven or eight feet in its greatest height, ten in width, and 

 seven in horizontal depth. It was almost filled with bones, 

 among which were two entire skulls, which he recognised at once 

 as human. The people of Aurignac, astonished to hear of the 

 occurrence of so many human relics in so lonely a spot, flocked 

 to the cave, and Dr. Amiel, the Mayor, ordered all the bones 

 to be taken out and reinterred in the parish cemetery. But 

 before this was done, having as a medical man a knowledge 

 of anatomy, he ascertained by counting the homologous 

 bones that they must have formed parts of no less than seven 

 teen skeletons of both sexes, and all ages; some so young that 

 the ossification of some of the bones was incomplete. He also 

 remarked that the size of the adults was such as to imply 

 a race of small stature. Unfortunately the skulls were 

 injured in the transfer ; and what is worse, after the lapse of 

 eight years, when M. Lartet visited Aurignac, the village 

 sexton was unable to tell him in what exact place the trench 

 was dug, into which the skeletons had been thrown, so that 

 this rich harvest of ethnological knowledge seems for ever lost 

 to the antiquary and geologist. 



M. Lartet having been shown, in 1860, the remains of some 



