216 
have taken place exactly where the bone was found, which was 
not really in the cavern, but just at its entrance. 
If this explanation is admitted, then the boulder clay is but 
remanie, and may have been deposited long- after the glacier 
had ceased to move in the Ribble Valley. My firm conviction 
is that neither the bone in question, nor any of the other bones 
in this deposit are pre-glacial. 
So much for the age of the bone, but now a word or two more 
about the bone itself. Prof. Boyd Dawkins, in his interesting 
book on Cave-hunting, p. 121, says “that the comparison of 
the bone with a specimen in the possession of Prof. Busk 
removed all doubt from his mind as to its having belonged 
to a man who was contemporary with the Cave Hyaena, 
and the other Pleistocene animals found in the cave.” And 
again, referring to the bone, he says, p. 411, “The man 
to whom it belonged was probably devoured by the hyaenas 
who dragged into the den the Woolly Rhinoceros, Reindeer, 
and other creatures whose gnawed bones were strewn on the 
floor.” 
But Prof. Rupert Jones gave us a more minute description of 
the bone and of the relations of the man to whom it belonged. 
In a lecture on the Antiquity of Man, delivered April 26th, 
1876, he says that the bone “is platycnemic in character, that 
is, it belonged to some sharp-shinned race, such as are found in 
the old deposits at Gibraltar, Central Prance, and North 
Wales.” 
And so the evidence appeared to stand until 1 1th April, 1877, 
when Prof. Dawkins, in concluding a paper before the Geological 
Society, with a candour quite characteristic, expressed his grow- 
ing doubt about the human origin of the bone, and at a 
conference convened by the Anthropological Institute in the 
following month, to consider “ the present state of the question 
of the Antiquity of Man,” Prof. Dawkins then gave his reasons 
for believing that instead of the bone being human it was a 
portion of the fibula of a bear. The reasons were judged con- 
clusive, for almost without exception the palaeontologists then 
present were prepared to give it up. Prof. Busk rose to say, 
respecting the bone, which he facetiously designated the bone 
of contention, that he “ was perfectly open to be convinced that 
it might be ursine.” And at the late meeting of the British 
Association at Dublin, a communication from Prof. Busk was 
read, in which he says, “ I have received from Toulouse two 
ursine fibulae of abnormal si/e, which in t lie part corresponding 
to the fragment of contention so closely resemble it as to leave 
little room for doubt that the latter is, or may be, in reality 
ursine, and not human; 1 am disposed, therefore, to acknowledge 
