1894.] Archeolog, and Ethnology. 821 
ARCHEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY. 
Gailenreuth Cave in 1894.— Dr. Zittel says (Beiträge zur An- 
thropologie und Urgeschichte Baierns ii, p. 226) that the remarkable 
discoveries in the English and French caves about 1875, caused the 
comparatively recent exploration, notably by Dr. Fraas (about 1877), 
of caverns in the limestone valleys of the upper tributaries of the Main 
(in the Franconian Switzerland, Bavaria) and along the northern con- 
fluents of the Danube (in Würtemberg). But, as he explains, J. F. 
Esper (Ausführliche Nachricht von neuentdeckten Zoolithen, 1774), 
had scientifically examined several of the Wiesent Valley caves (in 
Franconia) more than a hundred years before, and, as far as is known, 
had anticipated all investigators—even the Rev. McEnery, the long- 
neglected explorer of Kent's Hole—in the discovery of human remains 
associated with the bones of extinct Plistocene mammals. 
The cave map of Bavaria (Beitrüge zur Urgesch. Bai. 2, plate 14) 
is thickly dotted with the red signs for caverns in the mill region north 
of the right Danube bank between Ulm and Ratisbon, here and there 
in the Alpine valleys of the Iller, Isar and Saal far to the southward, 
but thickest of allalong the upper Main Valley by the Wiesent, Ails- 
bach and Püttbach tributaries, about a spot twenty miles to the south- 
west of Bayreuth. Here it was, in the hill-top cave, one-quarter of a 
mile from the Castle Gailenreuth (left bank of Wiesent, two miles 
above Muggendorf ), that Esper’s most important work was done. The 
entombed bones of legendary Dragons and Unicorns, the extraordinary 
teeth exhumed during the Middle Ages to be ground into medical nos- 
trums, had not yet been rearranged into the now well-known shapes of 
Mammoth, Cave Bear, Hyena and Rhinoceros. Human prehistoric 
work in stone was unrecognized, and the existence of River Drift and 
Cave Men was unsuspected, when at Gailenreuth, on finding a human 
jaw with three teeth and a shoulder-blade in a layer of “Antediluvian " 
bones, Esper made the memorable observation : 
“Since they (the human remains) lay under the animal bones with 
which the Gailenreuth Cave was filled ; since they were found in what, 
in all probability, was their original layer, I infer, not without adequate 
ground, that these human relics were of like age with the animal re- 
mains above them." 
This remarkable inference, in 1774, making Gailenreuth classic 
ground for the cave explorer, was carried no farther by Esper. Nor 
* This department is edited by H. C. Mercer, University of Pennsylvania. 
