542 ON CAVES CONTAINING BONES 



up some in good preservation, such as radii, cubiti, fe- 

 mora, humeri, fragments of jaws, calcarea, toes, verte- 

 brae, &c., belonging to bears of different sizes, of the 

 species termed Ursus spelceus. It would appear that 

 the hyena tribe is rather rare here, for 1 only procured 

 a single bone belonging to it. It was particularly in 

 two small lateral chambers, near the narrow passage, 

 that I obtained a great quantity of these bones, the clay 

 there having been dug up by the guides, in order to 

 make the floor of the great apartment even with it. 



I continued to dig as I advanced, and everywhere 

 found bones more or less broken and enveloped in the 

 clayey mud. After proceeding for half an hour, I fell 

 in with a mass, in an apartment of considerable dimen- 

 sions, which was of a conical form, and composed of 

 blocks of compact white limestone, of all sizes, mixed 

 with yellowish clayey mud. These blocks had their 

 edges as sharp as if they had only been lately broken. 

 The mass, which reached to the right wall of the cave, 

 might be fifteen feet in height, and twenty in diameter 

 at its base : it was covered with stalactite in several 

 places. It was in this mass, at about ten feet above the 

 floor of the cave, in the clayey mud that filled up the 

 interstices between the blocks, that I found the entire 

 skeleton of a young bear, in a space of two square feet 

 at most. The bones which I dug out were the frontal 

 part of the head, the lower jaw of the left side, the 

 seventh cervical and eighth dorsal vertebrae ; the eighth 

 and fourteenth ribs of the right side ; two tibia, femora, 

 and cubiti, and two large canine teeth of another bear. 

 If I could have raised up the limestone blocks, between 

 which these bones lay, I might without doubt have pro- 



