90 GOSSIP ON ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 



simple strata later than the recent, although it would not be extra- 

 ordinary if his remains should be discovered in mingled strata — 

 that upon which he was created with that upon which the extinct 

 animals roamed and existed. This order does no \iolence to 

 chronology, but rather sustains it. It makes man the last created 

 mammal, and the cattle preceding him, and the wild beasts later 

 still ; and still preceding them extinctions of species for which the 

 earth had become gradually unfitted. It goes further. It settles 

 the point with reference to cave deposits and river alluviums, which 

 are simply the mud of the erosions of surface and lower strata, 

 burdened with the contents of each as the floods have reached 

 them consecutively, sometimes mingled in their passage, or em- 

 bedded successively at lower levels than the sites from which they 

 had been washed. And this is the reason why we sometimes find 

 flint implements in the lowest beds, or mingled with animal remains 

 in the strata next imposed. 



I have thus come shortly, with due reference to the time which 

 reading this paper will occupy, to that stage of progress when 

 exemplifications are necessary to verify the positions I have 

 assumed. I find these, to my own satisfaction at least, in the book 

 to which I have so frequently referred. 



Sir Charles Lyell alludes to the investigations made by M. 

 Tournal, an eminent archaeologist, in 1828, in the cavern of Bize, 

 in the department of the Aude, South of France. M. Tournal 

 states that in this cavern he had found human bones and teeth, 

 together icith fragments of rude pottery in the same mud and breccia, 

 cemented by stalagmite, in ivhich land shells of living species were 

 imbedded, and the bones of mammalia, some of extinct, others of 

 recent species. The human bones were declared by his fellow 

 labourer, M. Marcel de Serres, to be in the same chemical condition 

 as those of the accompanying quadrupeds. Five years later M. 

 Tournal, speaking of these fossils, states that — " they could not be 

 referred to a diluvial catastrophe, but must have been introduced 

 gradually, together with the enveloping sand and gravel at succes- 

 sive periods ^ 



If the pottery described here was in a similar position to that 

 described by M. Christol in the cavern of Pondres, to which I 

 have previously alluded, we may suppose the relics of man in the 



