GEOLOGY AND MINERALOGY. 243 



pebbles, among which were mixed, in great disorder, bones and 

 horns of a Chamois, Cerr us pieudovirgi /nanus, C. megaceros and Bos, 

 together with implements of stone and bone, to which MM. Isidore 

 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and E. Lartet have referred in the Comptes 

 BendusofMay 10, 1S5S. 



M. E. Lartet, in his letter, has furnished drawings and descrip- 

 tions of some barbed Arrow-heads of bone, some having indented 

 grooves, probably for the appliance of poison ; also needles, and a 

 flute-bevelled tool of bone, a splinter or knife of hard flint, and 

 the horn of an Antelope hacked at the base, probably when the 

 animal was flayed. 



REMAINS OF MAN IN CAYES. 



Sir Gardiner Wilkinson observes, in a letter, that " hasty con- 

 clusions should not be drawn respecting the contemporaneousness of 

 Man with those Animals with whose Remains they are found in Caves. 

 Sir Charles Lyell has already noticed the very pertinent fact that 

 the human skulls are of the Caucasian variety, belonging, therefore, 

 to one of those races which now inhabit Europe. The conclusion 

 that, because their bones are deposited in the same cave, men and 

 extinct animals must have lived at the same period, is as unnecessary 

 as it is unreasonable ; and any one who has observed the process 

 by which caverns and fissure? in some parts of the world are rilled 

 with red cave-earth, similar to that found in many of our own 

 limestone formations, will cease to feel surprised at the mixture of 

 bones of extinct mammalia with those of man. 



" It is evident that if thosebones of animals had been first enclosed 

 in the earth which formed a superficial coating of any limestone 

 rock, and human remains had happened in after ages to be buried 

 in the same earth, the bursting of a lake, or some other accident, 

 might have brought upon it a body of water which, sinking into and 

 disintegrating the substance of that earth (for the effect has not 

 been that of a constant flow of water wearing by attrition the edges 

 of rolled substances), would shift it from its original position, and by 

 depositing the bones of animals and of men irregularly in some cave, 

 would give them the appearance of having been contemporaneous. 

 They may be contemporaneous in the cave, but not so as to the period 

 when both were on the surface of this earth ; and the same remark 

 applies to flints and other objects cut out or fashioned by man. 



" In the bare limestone mountains of Egypt are many examples of 

 caves filled with red earth, which, exposed to view by the fall of the 

 cliffs, afford good illustrations of the manner in which the earth, 

 once on the surface, has been washed, and is still sinking, into 

 those caves, even in a country so little visited by rains ; and it is 

 this red earth which tinges the stalagmitic deposits so generally found 

 within them. It is true those caves (like many of our own) con- 

 tain neither the bones of extinct animals nor of men — the Egyptians 

 not having had the habit, common in Europe, of living, or burying 

 bodies, on heights — but the process of the gradual washing of the 

 red earth from the surface into the caves is the same, r.r.d I hare 



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