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ANIMAL REMAINS FOUND AT CISSBURY. 415 



none such is forthcoming, we have a fresh point of agreement 

 between the fauna of Cissbury and that of other excavations of the 

 stone period. 



The bones of a young badger, Meles taxus, as also of a young 

 fox, Cants vulpes, have been put into my hands from the Cissbury 

 excavations \ their exact locality is not specified ; and it is possible 

 that they may be of comparatively modern date. It should be 

 noted that neither the red- deer nor the roe antlers are always 

 merely shed horns, portions of the frontal bone being in some cases 

 left in connexion with them. 



I come now to the fauna of the ' skeleton shaft/ the shaft in 

 which a human skeleton was found, as described by Colonel Lane 

 Fox, p. $7$, 1. c, Journal. The animal remains found in this shaft 

 not only bear directly upon the mode of life and degree of culture 

 which the excavators of this shaft and its fellows enjoyed, but 

 they also very irrefragably prove that these shafts had been filled 

 up before the second race of stone-using men dug their ditch and 

 threw up their ramparts. It will be convenient, firstly, to give an 

 account of the vertebrate animal remains, as has been already done 

 with those found in Mr. TyndalFs and in the f large pit ' ; secondly, 

 to show how the shells of the mollusca, found in great abundance 

 in the shaft, bear, as the shells of mollusca so ordinarily do, upon 

 the age of the various strata in which they are found ; and, thirdly, 

 to describe the human skeleton found with those remains, attempt- 

 ing whilst doing this to frame some reasonable hypothesis as to the 

 way in which this representative of the horde of Cissbury flint- 

 miners came by her death and burial. 



III. Mammalian remains from Sheleton Pit. 



The skeleton shaft was a smaller but not a shallower pit than 

 most of those examined by us at Cissbury ; its diameter was 4 feet 

 6 inches, whilst its depth from the surface, before the ditch was 

 made, was 14 feet. In this pit were found more than 1000 sepa- 

 rate bones and fragments of bones of artiodactyle mammals, mixed 

 up with an almost entirely complete human skeleton, but contrast- 

 ing with it, firstly, in being usually fragmentary themselves, and, 

 secondly, in making up by no means the full tale of the bones 

 of the skeletons which they represented. The immense majority, 

 about 6co out of 1000, of the lower animal bones in this pit was 



