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



Austrian geologist, Ami Boue, discovered some bones comprising 

 half a skeleton, but no skull, in the loess at the little town of 

 Lahr, two German miles from the Ehine, almost opposite Strasburg 

 in Baden. Speaking of the loess there and of this discovery, we 

 are told : " Ce depot renferme des os d'especes perdues, et c'est 

 lui qu'une fouille avait entame. Des ossements etaient places a 

 differentes hauteurs et dans des lieux ou rien n'indique qu'il y ait 

 eu jadis un cimetiere. D'ailleurs les os etaient tellement engages 

 dans la roche qu'il fallut prendre assez de peine pour les degager ; 

 I'auteur fut oblige d'en laisser qui etaient situes trop avant dans la 

 marne, tandis que cette derniere ne paraissait nullement avoir ete 

 remaniee et offrait en outre quelques coquilles terrestres d'eau 

 douce." (Materiaux, etc., xviii, 29, 30.) 



Boue, who was convinced that human bones could not exist under 

 such conditions, and thought they must belong to some animal like 

 man, sent the bones to Cuvier, and was greatly surprised when 

 Cuvier pronounced them to be human. In 1829 M. Boue revisited 

 the place where he had made his discovery, and confirmed his 

 former observations, but in view of Cuvier's determined scepticism 

 he suggested the possibility that, although the bones had not been 

 artificially buried by man, they might have been washed to the 

 place where they occurred, together with their matrix, in some 

 exceptional flood of the Schutter or Ehine. In reporting these facts 

 he further mentions that Count Razumofski had discovered some 

 human skulls mixed with the remains of extinct animals in the 

 deposit covering the Magnesian Limestone near Baden in Lower 

 Austria. This last discovery has a more important meaning, of 

 course, than it had in 1829, when the antiquity of man was still 

 in question (see Ann. Sci. Nat., vol. xviii, partie Bibliographique, 

 150, 151).i 



Lyell tells us that the collection of Lahr bones found by Boue 

 was left in Cuvier's care, and having been neglected was lost 

 (" Antiquity of Man," 4th ed., 244). Boue maintained his views in 

 spite of Cuvier's scepticism, and many years afterwards, namely, in 

 1852, communicated to the Berlin Academy a short paper embodying 

 his previous researches, in which he reiterates that the bones had 

 not been artificially buried, and says : " Icli noch jetzt damals glauben 

 muss dass diesen Knochen wie die Schneclcen-Gehckise gleicJizeitig mit 

 dem mergeligen Loss-Gebilde und selbst in seinen untern Schichten 

 ahgesetzt wurden " (Sitzberichte, vol. viii, p. 89). 



In the same year that Boue made his discovery, i.e. in 1823, 

 Professor Crahay read a paper before the Maestricht Academy on 

 a human lower jaw still preserved at Leyden, which was found 

 19 feet below the surface, where the loess joins the gravel and is 

 overlain by intact and undisturbed pebbly and sandy beds. Large 

 numbers of remains of extinct animals were found apparently at the 



1 In my previous paper I carelessly gave a wrong reference for these facts, about 

 •which my friend Professor Eupert Jones is rightly sarcastic, and which I have now 

 corrected. The reference is, however, a difficult one, and the "partie Biblio- 

 graphique " was published separately, and has a distinct pagination. 



