58 Dr J. W. Dawson on tftz Antiquity of Man, 



genius^ Rhinoceros tichorhinus, Ursus spelceus, and their 

 contemporaries ; or rather as evidence that man was begin- 

 ning to appear in Western Europe before those animals had 

 finally disappeared. In consequence of some flaws in the 

 evidence, as it appears to a reader at a distance, we cannot 

 as yet so implicitly receive the evidence of the Somme flint 

 weapons. The cave of Aurignac described by M. Lartet, 

 and in which seventeen human skeletons were found buried, 

 apparently in a sitting posture, cannot .be relied on, owing 

 to the late period at which it was explored. We are sorry 

 to doubt this unique instance of antediluvian sepulchral 

 rites ; but all the appearances actually seen"^ by M. Lartet 

 are better explicable on the supposition that a cave, once 

 tenanted by the cave-bear and hysena, had been partially 

 emptied of its contents by some primitive tribe, who had 

 broken up the bones of the extinct animals, not for their 

 marrow, but to make tools and ornaments of them, and had 

 subsequently used the cave as a place of burial, and the 

 ground in front of it for " feasts for the dead." If the bones 

 are still so perfect as M. Lartet asserts, they must have 

 been quite sound when first disturbed at the early historical 

 time in which the cave may have been ransacked. Further, 

 the skeleton of Ursus spelceus found in the interior was below 

 the place of deposit of the human skeletons ; and we can 

 suppose it to have been contemporaneous only by the un- 

 likely theory that the earth containing this skeleton was 

 placed in the cave by the aboriginal people.! 



We give the above leading cases as examples of the rest 

 which are cited, and all of which may in like manner be 

 divided into those which afford probable, though not abso- 

 lutely certain evidence of Post-pliocene man, and those which 

 are liable to too grave suspicion to be accepted as evidence. 

 It may be said that we should be more ready to believe, and 

 less critical, but it is not the wont of geologists to be so, 



* We refer to M, Lartet's account of his discovery in the " Natural History 

 Review," as well as the more concise statement given in the book before us. 



t It is certainly very curious that the objects and arrangements of these 

 caves, and other ancient European depositories, are so thoroughly American, 

 even to the round stone-hammers, whose use is so oddly misinterpreted by the 

 Danish antiquaries. 



