92 
DATE OF THE HUMAN SKELETON. 
laid in the grave: it is a substance, however, which occurs abundantly 
in the limestone rocks of the neighbourhood. 
The disturbed state of the diluvial earth all over the bottom of 
the cave, and fractured condition of the ancient bones, may have 
been produced by digging in search of more ivory, or to gratify the 
curiosity which the discovery of such large and numerous remains 
must naturally have excited; and in the course of these diggings the 
antediluvian bones would become mixed with those of modern ani¬ 
mals which had been introduced for food. The preservation of so 
large a part of the elephant’s tusk may probably have arisen from the 
use to which it was destined, and had been in part appropriated in 
the making of rods and rings. 
From all these circumstances there is reason to conclude, that the 
date of these human bones is coeval with that of the military occu¬ 
pation of the adjacent summits, and anterior to, or coeval with, the 
Roman invasion of this country. 
The above are the most remarkable phenomena in the interior 
of this cave. It remains only to describe a long cavernous aperture 
that rises like a crooked chimney from its roof to the nearly vertical 
face of the rock above: its form and diameter are throughout irre¬ 
gular, the latter being about twelve feet where longest, and in its 
narrowest part about three feet; so that it is impossible the large ele¬ 
phant, whose bones were found in the cave below, could have been 
drifted down entire through this aperture. It expands and contracts 
irregularly from D, its lower extremity in the roof of the cavern, to K, 
the point at which it terminates in the face of the cliff. (See Plate XXI.) 
Along this tortuous ascent are several lateral cavities, L. L. L., the 
