934 PROFESSOR J. PRESTWICK OK THE EVIDENCES OF A SUBMERGENCE 
preserved than in the solid parts. It was amongst this debris that the jaw was 
discovered. It was coated with the same film of stalagmite as the other bones of 
which the antiquity could not be doubted. Cuvier, however, thought that the uncon¬ 
solidated part of the breccia, to v/hich the jaw belonged, might be of more recent 
date than the consolidated portion, but this is no test, and it must be remembered 
that, at that time, the belief in the recent creation of Man was universal, and, like 
the later discovery of Man’s works in the cave deposits of Kent’s Hole, it led 
geologists to look with doubt at anything which was not in accordance with that 
belief Apart from this cause of doubt, Cuvier’s own account affords reasonable 
evidence of the contemporaneity of the jaw with the other bones. 
[Though M. KiviIcre’s work [ante p. 931), is devoted mainly to the description of the 
Mentone Caves, he touches incidentally upon the breccia of the ossiferous fissures of 
Nice,* which he considers to be analogous to the breccia on the Mentone slopes. He 
describes the Nice breccia as consisting of two parts, a lower one, red and compact 
with land shells, aud an upper one, less compact, of a brown or black colour, with 
sea-shells and bones sometimes black as if burnt, and some of them split longitudi¬ 
nally as if for the purpose of extracting the marrow. He concluded that the Nice 
fissures had served, like the Caves of Baussi-Kaussi, as habitations for a prehistoric 
people, and that these people were of late Quaternary age (p. 314). The fissures of 
Nice may, however, like those of Gibraltar, have been only partly filled by the 
osseous breccia leaving, owing to the inequalities of their sides, cavities and open 
spaces, which were subsequently used as habitations by a later race of men and 
animals. This would be in accordance with the succession of deposits elsewhere—a 
succession forming three separate stages, namely ;— 
1st. The older Palaeolithic bone-breccia of the caves. 
2nd. The angular Rubble-drift and breccia of the slopes and fissures, with similar 
Quaternary animal remains. 
3rd. The more recent cave beds of the Neolithic epoch. 
When the Rubble-drift masks the caves, no Neolithic deposits are met with; but 
when, as at Baussi-Raussi, there is no stalagmite floor or Rubble-drift to separate the 
first and third of these deposits, they may then appear to pass one into the other. 
The reason of the small percentage of extinct species from the Mentone caves, noted 
by M. Riviere, seems to me to be owing to the circumstance that he takes the whole 
contents of the cave as belonging to one epoch, and does not give separate lists of the 
different beds. He thus obtains a total of 281 species (p. 529), consisting of (10 
Mammals, 2 Reptiles, 42 Birds, 7 Fishes, 1G8 Mollusca, 1 Annelid, and 1 Polype, the 
result being that the average gives an undue proportion of recent species, t There is 
* Op. cit., p. .32. 
t It is true that M. RivitRE speaks of Lion and Panther in connection with this upper bed, but 
neither the depth from the surface nor the other conditions are given, and there are other ways of 
accounting for their presence. 
