CHAP. X. DISCOVERY OF HUMAN BONES. 183 



matter, £>, such as the rain may have washed down the slope 

 of the hilL In that year a hxborer named Bonnemaison, 

 employed in repairing the roads, observed that rabbits, Avhen 

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

 had burrowed in the talus, at if, fig. 25. On reaching as fiir 

 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 lai'ge heavy slab of rock, 

 / h, placed vertically against the enti-ance. 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 recognized at 

 once as human. The people of Aui^ignac, 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 cemeterj^. 

 But before this was done, having as a medical man a know- 

 ledge 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 j'oung 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 knov/ledge seems forever lost to 

 the antiquary and geologist. 



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



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