2g 



and ox. The bones that were found most plentifully were 

 those of red deer, which were very abundant ; remains of wild 

 boar were also numerous. Human bones were found buried 

 in one of the pits ; the skull was long-shaped, the jaws not 

 projecting, the forehead prominent, but low, These remains 

 wele strictly confined to the surface, or to the pits and exca- 

 vations communicating with it ; no appreciable change had 

 taken place in the surface of the country since their epoch. 



The remains of the more ancient period are quite different 

 in this respect; they consist of only a few rude but unquestion- 

 able weapons, all of them found in a bed of broken flints, 

 chalk, and gravel," 1 that is evidently a deposit formed in the 

 bed of a rapid river, which must have flowed at a height of 

 eight feet above the beds of the rivers La Trouille and Nou- 

 velles, and^therefore before their ravines had been cut out of 

 that depth of chalk ; bones of rhinoceros, mammoth, cave bear, 

 cave hyaena, and other extinct animals were plentiful in this 

 bed. Since its deposition and consequently since the time of 

 the men who made the weapons found in it, the ancient river 

 has slackened in speed, and a considerable thickness of clay, 

 loam, and sand has been deposited by the running water over 

 the flints ; over this a bed of brick clay has been formed, 

 partly by the flooding of the ri^sers which had altered their 

 channels, and partly by the the action of rain bringing down 

 mud from the higher grounds. These two beds of clay over 

 the flint bed have attained a thickness of forty feet in the 

 cutting of Spiennes, or the land between the two rivers, and 

 twenty feet in the cutting of Mesvin, which is beyond the 

 River Nouvelles. After all this, again, the rivers must have 

 cut out their ravines through a thickness in some places of 

 eighty feet of chalk rock, which they have removed from off 

 large areas ; finally, in the bottom of the ravines the streams 

 have deposited a thickness of about, five feet of sand, peat, 

 and alluvial mud. 



