224 FOSSIL MEN. 



these caves he found alluvial clay, with bones of the 

 mammoth and what are supposed to be rude flint im- 

 plements, and implements of reindeer-horn ; a single 

 jawbone being the only remains of man. Newer than 

 this was the sepulchre of Frontal, referred by Dupont 

 to the Eeindeer period of the Palaeolithic age, in which 

 were skeletons, well-made flint weapons, wampum of 

 fossil shells, a flint spear, and fragments of pottery. 

 It is remarkable that the objects found imply art and 

 extensive commerce, of which the supposed Neolithic 

 or more modern graves of Belgium show much less evi- 

 dence. Now, if one of M. Dupont's caves, containing 

 drifted material below and sepulchral material above, 

 were by a new inundation or cataclysm to be again tra- 

 versed by water, so as to mix up its contents, and were 

 then left undisturbed, it would present precisely the 

 appearances described by Schmerling in the Engis cave. 

 Similar remarks apply to other caverns of driftage, 

 except that in caves like Kent's Hole and Brixham, 

 where only implements and not human bones are 

 found, the facts have probably not been complicated 

 with sepulchral arrangements. In any case, to apply 

 to the explanation of such caves the continued opera- 

 tions of merely modern causes, without taking into 

 account floods and other cataclysmic agents, is a stretch 

 of uniformitarianism which the deposits in the caves 

 themselves plainly contradict. Thus the calculations 

 which we can make as to age, rather serve to bring 

 the age of the mammoth up toward us than to throw 

 man back in geological time, while the association 



