8 BELIQULE AQTJITANICLE. 



underground cavities, of difficult access, or having no external communication 

 but by fissures and cracks, more or less vertical, but large enough to give passage 

 to the streams carrying and depositing the bones of animals. 



Later researches have obliged us to recognize the intervention of Man, to a 

 great extent, and in some cases exclusively, in the accumulation of the organic 

 debris in a large number of caverns, inasmuch as, nearly always, the same 

 deposits contain works of industry, fragments of charcoal and of burnt bones, 

 as well as other signs of a more or less prolonged habitation by Man. 



Relative Chronology of Bone-caves. By the comparative examination of the 

 material, the form, and style of the works of industry, together with the study of 

 the specific characters recognizable in the Mammalian bones found with them, 

 we have been able to refer these organic deposits to different successive periods, 

 thus forming a kind of Relative Chronology of the Bone-caves. 



Thus, as it has been already said, it is generally accepted that the infilling 

 of those caverns in which are found polished stone axes, accompanied only 

 by bones of domestic animals, is of a more recent date than that of the 

 deposits in certain other caves where domestic animals are wanting, where 

 there has been only simply worked, not polished, flint, and where there 

 are abundant remains of extinct or emigrated Mammals, among others the 

 E/eindeer. 



If sometimes, to distinguish the latter caves, we have designated them as 

 being of the Reindeer Age, simply because the bones of this animal have 

 there a great numerical predominance, we have not thereby intended to limit 

 the local existence of the Reindeer to the particular epoch to which these 

 caverns appear to belong. The bones of Reindeer have, indeed, been observed, 

 though in smaller numbers, in other caves, reputed older because, with works 

 of industry somewhat different, there is also an association of the remains of 

 the large Pachyderms, the extinction of which is usually referred to a more 

 distant period. 



It is known also that Reindeer-bones have been collected from different beds of 

 " Diluvium," or Quaternary Alluviums of the beds of valleys. That they have come 

 down to the present time in very limited number only, as also those of other 

 Mammals of middling and small size, may perhaps be accounted for by their 

 offering less resistance than those of the great Pachyderms to the chances of 

 destruction from the multiplied shocks of the gravel and shingle among which 

 they would be hurried in rapid torrents. 



