CHAP. VIII. ABSENCE OP HUMAN BONES EXPLAINED, 145 



equally, as yet, in all other parts of Europe where the tool- 

 bearing drift of the post-pliocene period has been investigated 

 in valley deposits. Yot in these same formations there is no 

 want of bones of mammalia belonging to extinct and living 

 species. In the course of the last quarter of a century, thou- 

 sands of them have been submitted to the examination of skil- 

 ful osteologists, and they have been unable to detect among 

 them one fragment of a human skeleton, not even a tooth. 

 Yet Cuvicr pointed out, long ago, that the bones of man found 

 buried in ancient battle-fields were not more decayed than 

 those of horses interred in the same graves. We have seen 

 that in the Liege caverns the skulls, jaws, and teeth, with 

 other bones of the human race, were preserved in the same 

 condition as those of the cave-bear, tiger, and mammoth. 



That ere long, now that curiosity has been so much excited 

 on this subject, some human remains will be detected in the 

 older alluvium of European valleys, I confidently expect. In 

 the mean time, the absence of all vestige of the bones which 

 belonged to that population by which so many weapons were 

 designed and executed, affords a most striking and instructive 

 lesson in regard to the value of negative evidence, when ad- 

 duced in proof of the non-existence of certain classes of ter- 

 restrial animals at given periods of the past. It is a new and 

 emphatic illustration of the extreme imperfection of the geo- 

 logical record, of which even they who are constantly work- 

 ing in the field cannot easily form a just conception. 



We must not forget that Dr. Schmerling, after finding 

 extinct mammalia and flint tools in forty-two Belgian caverns, 

 was only rewarded by the discovery of human bones in three 

 or four of those rich repositories of osseous remains. In like 

 manner, it was not till the year 1855 that the first skull of 

 the musk buffalo {Bubalus moschatus) was detected in the fos- 

 silifcrous gravel of the Thames, and not till 1860, as will be 

 seen in the next chapter, that the same quadruped was proved 



