372 SCIENCE FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



now call them are the leading discoverers in all that 

 relates to very early man. The caves in Central and 

 Southern France (Dordogne, Pyrenees, and Riviera) 

 and the gravels in the north have furnished the most 

 wonderful and interesting evidences of the existence of 

 human beings at an immensely remote period in this 

 part of Europe. Enthusiastic excavators and collectors 

 of French nationality have discovered, preserved, and 

 described the weapons, carvings, and drawings made by 

 the old cave-dwellers of Southern France, buried by the 

 accumulated deposits of ages deep in the caverns where 

 the human artists who made these things used to live. 

 In England only two such caves containing the imple- 

 ments of prehistoric men have been found whilst a few 

 are known in Belgium, Moravia, and Switzerland. 



Although we know an immense number of the flint 

 instruments, bone harpoons, and carvings and drawings 

 of the ancient cave-dwellers, yet skulls and bones of 

 the men themselves are extremely rare. Bones, skulls, 

 and teeth of the animals they killed and ate are 

 abundant in the caves such as those of great bulls, 

 deer, and horses. The bones also of animals which 

 lived in these caves and contended with the ancient men 

 for the possession of the shelter afforded by them, are 

 abundant : bones of hyaena, of bear, of lion, and wolf. 

 But human bones are exceedingly rare. This arises 

 partly from the fact that human bones are not so thick 

 and strong as those of large animals, and more easily 

 soften, break up, and are lost. It is also due partly to 

 the fact that the men were not nearly so numerous as 

 the wild animals ; but it is chiefly due to the fact that 

 these people usually, but not always, buried their dead 

 in the open ; and whilst the bones of animals which had 

 been eaten were left about in heaps on the floor of the 

 caves, and became cemented together by the petrifying 



