18 Sir R. H. Howorth — Antiquity of Man. 



his own eyes tliat the bones of men had undoubtedly been found 

 mixed with those of bears and lions in the caves of Gailenreuth. 

 In the year 1700 some extensive excavations were made at 

 Cannstadt in Wiirtemberg, and a vast number of remains of 

 so-called Pleistocene beasts were found more than a century later. 

 These bones were examined, and a human jaw and some other 

 human remains were found among them. Cuvier, in referring to 

 them in the first edition of his Oss. Foss. in 1812, refused, however, 

 to consider the bones as contemporary. 



In the introduction to his " Petrefactenkundeo," published in 

 1820, Schlotheim, who explored the caves at Gailenreuth more 

 minutely, described how in the fissures in the gypsum quarries at 

 Kostritz in Germany human bones had undoubtedly been found 

 with the bones of Bhinoceros antiquus, an extinct horse, the great 

 extinct stag, and the fossil hyeena and lion. "Human bones had 

 been recognized there," he tells us, " since the first opening of 

 the quarries thirty years before, and in almost every gypsum 

 quarry in the district." The various bones were found together, 

 assembled in a heap. He argues that these bones could not have 

 come there by way of burial or adventitious falls into the fissures, 

 nor by other accidental causes, but were always found with the 

 other animal remains in the same relations, and they appeared to 

 he strictly fossil and to have been swept thither by floods, with the 

 other animal hones, at the period of the formation of the alluvial bed 

 itself If this view be confirmed, says our author, it will render 

 probable the supposition that the human bones found in calcareous 

 tufa are likewise referable to the same period, and consequently 

 that man existed here previous to the formation of the alluvial beds, 

 the last great revolution to which the earth has been subjected. 



In the Nachtrage to the same work published in 1822, Schlotheim 

 describes further researches in the same place, and speaking of the 

 human bones which were in his collection from there, he says : 

 ''They betray a great antiquity, although they have not all 

 undergone a change in an equal manner. Some of them have lost 

 their animal gluten and are even penetrated with gypsum, as is the 

 case with a considerable portion of the other animal bones, while 

 others are only slightly calcined and decomposed. This varying 

 condition of the bones is likewise observable in all the fossil bones 

 of Kostritz." 



Schlotheim tells us further that some human bones in his collection 

 were found 26 feet below the surface, and underneath two phalanges 

 of a rhinoceros, quite fossilized, which lay 8 feet above them,^ and 

 he urges that it is quite evident that in the country near Kostritz 

 human bones are found intermingled, without order, with the bones 



1 These bones, according to a statement by Mr. Carter Blake, are now or ought to 

 be in the British Museum. However this may be, I am safe in stating that there 

 is a fine series of Gailenreuth and Scharzfeldt cave-remains in the Geological 

 Department of the Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, formed by the 

 Earl of Enniskillen and Sir Philip de Malpas Grey Egerton in the early part of 

 the last century. 



