98 RELIQUIAE AQUITANICLE. 



antiquity of the human bones there exhumed. The stratigraphical details of the 

 contents of the Cro-Magnon Cave, furnished by M. Louis Lartet (see above, 

 pa<*es 62-72), prove that the human bones are not only as old as, but even 

 perhaps older than the carved objects from the great Les-Eyzies Cave. The 

 latter correspond with the Period when the Reindeer predominated in the Fauna ; 

 whilst the former belong rather to the Period of the Mammoth ; and though a 

 considerable time must have elapsed between the two periods, yet there is nothing 

 to hinder the belief of the gradual passage from one to the other, without any 

 ethnic revolution, the same race maintaining itself in the same district uninter- 

 ruptedly ; so that, if the bones from Cro-Magnon are not those of the artists of 

 the Reindeer Period, they are at least those of the ancestors of that people. 



The remains of the Men of the Quaternary Period that we have hitherto been 

 able to study belonged, for the most part, to individuals of short stature, with a 

 rather small cranium, and a more or less prognathous face. Hence it has been 

 concluded that the primitive population of Europe belonged to a Negroid race, 

 according to some, and according to others to a Mongoloid race, whose stature 

 did not much exceed that of the modern Laps. The facts on which this opinion 

 rests I take as exact ; but it rests also on a preconceived idea, which, for my part, 

 I have long combated namely, that in Quaternary Europe there was only one 

 race of Men. Starting with the ethnogenic theory, that the diversity of the 

 Human Race is produced by the influence of time and circumstances, the holders 

 of the above-mentioned opinion admit that the typical differences ought to be less 

 and less as we look back to past ages ; and when the Polygenists object that the 

 separation of the principal groups of races was already complete in the earliest 

 historical times, they are told that it was not in those times, so close to our own, 

 but in the immense and incalculable preceding periods that the divergences from 

 the original type were manifested. Reduced to these terms, the question of the 

 Unity of the Human Race is adjourned to the time when Palaeontology shall have 

 discovered the remains of Primitive Man, or at least relics of the races of the 

 Quaternary Epoch. The Monogenists suppose that these races, separated from 

 us by thousands of ages perhaps, and for certain infinitely nearer to original Man 

 than the most ancient of the historic races, ought to present, if not an absolute 

 uniformity, at least a manifest convergence towards the type of the common 

 mould whence, they believe, all the races came. 



It comes to this, however, (and it is usually the case,) that facts begin to 

 contradict a preconceived hypothesis. The Quaternary race of Dordogne (Cro- 

 Magnon) differs from the Quaternary race of the Belgian Caves, as much at least 



