1S83.] Note on Fossil Human Bones. 633 



ded and thus perfectly preserved. In others, like Kirkdale, the mass 

 consists of a multitude of bones, half gnawed and rounded, among" 

 which is remarked a quantity of hyaenas' dung- (coprolite) ; in 

 others a narrow crevice is filled with skeletons of the smaller car- 

 nivorous animals and birds. The formation in all these cases is 

 natural and evident : the habits of bears and hyaenas of the pre- 

 sent day accord exactly with what we see to have been their practice in 

 ages past : the caves were the residence of these animals for genera- 

 tions, and were by no means filled by any brisk transient or universal 

 wave of transport : and there is no ground deducible from them for the 

 separation of organic remains into the two classes of ante and post- 

 diluvian. 



The soil of these caverns generally has a strictly local origin, and 

 may be identified with the debris of the neighbouring mountains. In 

 most cases it can be proved to have been gradually introduced from 

 some opening above, and not from apertures fronting the present val- 

 leys, which have in most cases been laid bare by the subsequent denu- 

 dation of the channel of the present rivers, when the level of the ocean 

 subsided : the strata of soil can be divided into the finest lamina?, and 

 very often thick strata of stalagmite separate one bed of soil, and its 

 contents, from the next. 



Having proved that the fossil caves vary in their contents from local 

 circumstances, and that they have been filled in very long periods, M. 

 Tournal comes to the important question, whether the cave deposit 

 ever contains human bones, or pottery and works of human art ; and, if 

 so, whether these objects appear to be coeval with the other matter of 

 the caves ; in fact, whether man was or was not contemporaneous with 

 animals now considered to be extinct, and, as it were, belonging to a 

 former creation. 



Human remains had been long since observed both in what was 

 called diluvial clay, and in the soil of caves ; but their presence was 

 deemed accidental, and it became a dogma of the science that man 

 existed not in a fossil state. The recent discovery however of the caverns 

 of Aude, Herault, and Gard exposed a vast magazine of human bones 

 and antique pottery inclosed in the self-same matrix with the hyaena, lion, 

 tiger, stag, and numerous other animals, all of extinct species. Atten- 

 tion was thus once more awakened to the subject, and MM. De Serres, 

 Christol, and Tournal, after an attentive and conscientious examina- 

 tion, have come to the conclusion that all these objects, are of the 

 same date ; whence it results that man was the companion of animals 

 now considered extinct and fossil. The grounds of their opinion are ; — 



3 N 



