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for and devour such, human bones as they could disinter, and 
in so doing scatter the various ornaments and portions of 
earthen vessels which the former occupants had left with 
their own remains on the floor of the cave ? I may be told 
this reasoning would bring the life periods of the extinct 
mammalia down to too recent a date, as the coins suggest, that 
towards the close of the Roman occupation of Britain, or the 
latter part of the Fourth century. At all events this period 
is not too recent for the bear, wolf, and wild boar, which I 
have shown are of comparative late extirpation, and therefore 
might have frequented the caves long subsequent to man ; 
and the supposition that a solitary straggler of the tiger, 
whose remains are of rare occurrence, might have resorted to 
the cave subsequent to man's occupancy, is not so improbable 
as at first it might appear, from two circumstances. In the 
first place Mr. Jackson found the tooth of the tiger, and the 
teeth and bones of the bear, on the surface of the floor, near 
a place where a small stream of water had washed away the 
soil, and the jaw of the hyaena was in the clay just under- 
neath. And, secondly, from the fact of my finding the 
parietal bones of a human skull below the clay, soft stalagmite, 
and bones of the wolf, resting upon the rocky floor of the 
cave, which would at least imply that the human and canine 
remains were coeval ; and as we know the wolf existed at 
the same period with the hyaena, tiger, bear, hippopotamus, 
rhinoceros, and elephant, we may reasonably infer that man 
was also contemporary with the latter animals, which infer- 
ence I consider further strengthened by the circumstance 
that in this very neighbourhood the works of his hands were 
found in close approximation to the bones of the hippopota- 
mus, elephant, and urus, in the brick-clay at Wortley, during 
1852. This, however, does not necessarily imply that the 
Romanized Britons were the people contemporary with all 
the extinct animals enumerated, for, besides the various 
