192 RELATIVE ANTIQUITY OF AURIGNAC FOSSILS. chap. x. 



been the thickening of the talus which protected the loose 

 cinders and bones from waste. We behold in many a valley 

 of Auvergne, within fifty feet of the present river-channel, a 

 volcanic cone of loose ashes, with a crater at its summit, from 

 which powerful currents of basaltic lava have poured, usurj^ing 

 the ancient bed of the torrent. By the action of the stream, 

 in the course of ages, vast masses of the hard columnar basalt 

 have been removed, pillar after pillar, and much vesicular 

 lava, as in the case, for example, of the Puy Eouge, near 

 Chalucet, and of the Puy de Tartaret, near Nechers.* The 

 rivers have even in some cases, as the Sioule, near Chalucet, 

 cut through not only the basalt which dispossessed them of 

 their ancient channels, but have actually eaten fifty feet into 

 the subjacent gneiss j yet the cone, an incoherent heap of 

 scorise and spongy ejectamenta, stands unmolested. Had the 

 waters once risen, even for a day, so high as to reach the 

 level of the base of one of these cones, — had there been a single 

 flood fifty or sixty feet in height since the last eruption oc- 

 curred, a great part of these volcanoes must inevitably have 

 been swept away as readily as all traces of the layer of cinders; 

 and the accompanying bones would have been obliterated by 

 the Eodes near Aurignac, had it risen, since the days of the 

 mammoth, rhinoceros, and cave-bear, fifty feet above its 

 present level. 



The Aurignac cave adds no new species to the list of 

 extinct quadrupeds, which we have elsewhere, and by inde- 

 pendent evidence, ascertained to have once flourished con- 

 temporaneously with man. But if the fossil memorials have 

 been correctly interpreted, — if we have here before us at the 

 noi'thern base of the Pyrenees a sepulchral vault with 

 skeletons of human beings, consigned by friends and 

 relatives to their last resting-place, — if we have also at the 



* Scropc's Volcanoes of Central France, p. 97, 1858. 



