254 LECTURE IX. 



knife. From the absence of rolled stones and tlie condition of 

 the mud, which contains many excrements of hyenas, as -well as 

 traces of coals and fire, the authors conclude that beasts and 

 human beings inhabited the cave of Lherm alternately, but 

 that at all events man lived simultaneously with the extinct 

 cave beasts, since he worked their bones into weapons and 

 tools. No valid objection can be made to this deduction. 



A convincing proof of man having been the contemporary of 

 the cave bear has been furnished by the exploration of the 

 grottoes of Arcy near Avallon in the Department of the Yonne. 

 M. de Vibraye, who explored these grottoes, the largest of 

 which attains, including its halls, a length of 876 meters, whilst 

 the second or the fairy grotto in which most bones are found 

 reaches only 150 meters in length, distinguishes in these caves 

 three kinds of deposits. The lowest deposit, iatermixed with 

 rolled stones from the granite of the Morvan, hes immediately 

 upon the Jurassic lime, in which the cave is imbedded, it fills up 

 depressions and thus forms a stratum of variable thickness. 



There are found in it the cave bear, the cave hyaena, the rhino- 

 ceros with a bony septum, the mammoth, the river-horse, the 

 urns and the horse. In this lower stratum, which has a mean 

 thickness of about one meter fifty centimeters, was found, among 

 a large accumulation of bones chiefly belonging to cave bears, a 

 human lower jaw, and subsequently a human tooth. The jaw, 

 externally, resembles exactly the bones of the cave bear, which, 

 however, have mostly a thin carbonaceous crust, the result, 

 probably, of the decomposition of the skin and the soft parts 

 still attached to them. The middle layer of about seventy-five 

 centimeters in thickness consists almost entirely of calcareous 

 fragments from the mountain. The red cement which connects 

 the lower stratum of rolled stones, forms here, only an in- 

 crustation of the fragments. In this second middle layer, bear 

 and hysena bones are no longer met with, but numerous bones 

 of ruminants, including those of the reindeer. Quite on the 

 top is a very irregularly disposed stratum of marly clay, of 

 white-yellow colour, fatty and soapy to the touch. 



Though the jaw, found under such circumstances, gives no 

 clue as to the race, it afibrds, nevertheless, like the Belgian 



