THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL 581 
Professor Mayer’s physiology: but, granting the premises, the con- 
clusion is obvious. Given a rickety child with a bad habit of frown- 
ing (say from the internal flatulent disturbances to which such children 
are especially liable), and the result will be a Neanderthal man! 
Truly a “weitgreifende Folgerung!” 
The man being accounted for, the next difficulty is to get him 
into the cave, and bury him in the loam covering its floor. 
Professor Mayer admits that the bones were covered by at least 
two feet of loam, and were in undisturbed relation to one another 
(l.e. p. 19, 20.). He is quite clear that they were not drifted by floods 
into the cave (p. 20), or buried there in ancient, say preceltic, times, 
because the bones of other corpses, and the general attributes of old 
graves are absent (p. 21); and he concludes that the Neanderthal man 
must have crawled into the hole to die. The obvious inquiry follows, 
how did this singular person contrive to get buried under, at least, 
two feet of loam, after he had died there? And as the cave had an 
opening of only two feet in height, sixty feet up a vertical cliff, with 
only a very narrow plateau in front of it, it will be observed that the 
problem is not devoid of difficulties. Professor Mayer admits them, 
but meets them thus :— 
“Streams of water, therefore, could only have reached the grotto 
from the precipitous heights which rise above it to the south, and since 
the opening of the cave lies to the north, they could only have got 
into it, carrying the loam with them, by rebounding.” [durch Wider- 
schlag] (1. c. p. 20.) 
And now, having fairly got the man into the cave and covered 
him up by the‘ rebounding’ of cataracts of muddy water, who was he? 
A ‘Mongolian Cossack’ of Tchernitcheff’s corps d’armée is Pro- 
fessor Mayer’s suggestion ;—based upon three reasons : the first (p. 20) 
that the thigh bones are curved like those of people who spend their 
lives on horseback ; the second (p. 21), that any guess is better than 
the admission that the skeleton may possibly be thousands of years 
old ; the third, (p. 21-2) that, after all, the skull is more like that of a 
Mongol than that of an ape, or a Gorilla, or a New Zealander. 
Thus the hypothesis which is held up to us by Professor Mayer as 
an example of scientific sobriety comes to this: that the Neanderthal 
man was nothing but a rickety, bow-legged, frowning, Cossack, who, 
having carefully divested himself of his arms, accoutrements, and 
clothes (no traces of which were found), crept into a cave to die, and 
has been covered up with loam two feet thick by the ‘rebound ’ of the 
muddy cataracts which (hypothetically,) have rushed over the mouth 
of his cave. 
