Ch. X.] REINDEER PERIOD IN FRANCE. 125 



had no small influence in inducing many English and French geolo- 

 gists to appreciate more justly the opinion at which M. Boucher de 

 Perthes had arrived after his researches at Abbeville before men- 

 tioned, which were still regarded by the scientific public in general 

 with skepticism and suspicion. 



The absence of gnawed bones had led Di. Schmerling to infer that 

 none of the Belgian caves which he explored had served as the dens 

 of wild beasts ; but there are many caves in Germany and England 

 which have certainly been so inhabited, especially by the extinct 

 hyaena and bear. 



A fine example of a hyaena's den was afforded by the cave of Kirk- 

 dale, so well described by the late Dr. Buckland in his Reliquice Dilu- 

 viance. In that cave, about twenty-five miles N.N.E. of York, the 

 remains of about 300 hyaenas, belonging to individuals of every age, 

 were detected. The species (Hycena spelcea) is extinct, and was 

 larger than the fierce Hycena crocuta of South Africa, which it most 

 resembled. Dr. Buckland, after carefully examining the spot, proved 

 that the hyaenas must have lived there ; a fact attested by the quan- 

 tity of their dung, which, as in the case of the living hyaena, is of 

 nearly the same composition as bone, and almost as durable. In the 

 cave were found the remains of the ox, young elephant, hippopota- 

 mus, rhinoceros, horse, bear, wolf, hare, water-rat, and several birds. 

 All the bones have the appearance of having been broken and gnawed 

 by the teeth of the hyaenas ; and they occur confusedly mixed in loam 

 or mud, or dispersed through a crust of stalagmite which covers it. 

 In these and many other cases it is supposed that portions of herbiv- 

 orous quadrupeds have been dragged into caverns by beasts of prey, 

 and 'have served as then* food — an opinion quite consistent with the 

 known habits of the living hyaena. 



Reindeer period in South of France. — In the larger number of the 

 caves of Europe, as for example in those of England, Belgium, Ger- 

 many, and many parts of France, the animal remains agree specifi- 

 cally with the fauna of the oldest division of the age of stone, or that 

 to which belongs the drift of Amiens and Abbeville already men- 

 tioned, containing flint implements of a very antique type. But 

 there are some caves in the departments of Dordogne, Aude, and 

 other parts of the south of France, which are believed by M. Lartet 

 to be of intermediate date between that ancient division of the stone 

 age and the more modern one which is represented by the Swiss 

 lake-dwellings. To this intermediate era M. Lartet gave, in 1863, the 

 name of the " reindeer period," because vast quantities of the bones 

 and horns of that deer have been met with in those French caverns. 

 In some cases separate plates of molars of the mammoth, and several 

 teeth of the great Irish deer, Cervus Megaceros, have been found 

 mixed up with cut and carved bones of reindeer ; but whether these 

 extinct quadrupeds were really contemporaneous at the era in ques- 

 tion with man and the reindeer, is not vet clearlv made out. Al- 



