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which extend for miles, and in which, quite recently, most 
interesting relics of their early Indian inhabitants have been 
discovered. The famous water-caves of Styria, with their 
underground rivers and their magnificent stalactites, are well 
known to travellers ; and in Sicily, Italy, Spain, France, Bel- 
gium, and England, as well as in distant Australia and New 
Zealand, caves of varying extent are numerous. In many of 
these recent explorations have discovered relics of early occu- 
pation that have proved of the utmost value to science. 
A great number of caves have been found to contain so many 
remains of their former occupants, as to enable us to trace 
the history of their habitation during a long succession of ages, 
extending from the remote past of geological time to periods 
which are linked by history to the present. 
Although there are some few caverns which yet contain 
traces of their having existed and been occupied in the Meso- 
zoic epoch, yet in almost every case the records of cave occu- 
pation may be said to begin with that latest period of the 
geologist known as the Pleistocene ; and we find that then, as 
now, the caves and dens of the earth were a refuge and hiding- 
place to the wild beasts. Here some of them lived and died, and 
here they dragged their prey, either overcome in the chase, or 
torn to pieces when feeble and dying. In those remote times 
the hyaenas and the bears, the lions and the lynxes, and other 
carnivora, found their home in caves, just as these animals do 
at the present day, in the countries they now inhabit. 
It is in caves that we meet with the first undoubted traces of 
man’s existence on the earth. During some of the earliest stages 
of his history he appears to have used caves for the burial of his 
dead, and also as his habitation, often fixing upon those on the 
sunny side of a valley, and making them his home and his 
treasure-house. In the extreme north of the Asiatic continent 
it has been shown that a cave-dwelling people existed ante- 
rior to the Samoyedes. We read in Homer of cave-dwellers 
upon the shores of the Black Sea. Cave-tombs have been found 
in Australia, in the neighbourhood of the Grulf of Carpenteria ; 
and we learn from the Pentateuch that the early inhabitants 
of Palestine buried their dead in caves ; whilst recent African 
explorers have told us of a whole tribe of Troglodytes in the 
interior of that continent. Some writers have supposed that 
architecture itself may have had its origin in these primitive 
homes. From the remains of man — his weapons and his tools, 
his utensils and his ornaments — we may form a tolerably accu- 
rate idea of the habits and the amount of civilization, and of 
some of the conditions of life, of the early inhabitants of our 
own and of other countries. Speaking of some of the cave- 
dwellers in Western Europe, Sir John Lubbock writes : “ Their 
