BONES IN GERMAN CAVES COEVAL WITH THOSE IN ENGLAND. 99 
CAVES OF GERMANY. 
We may now proceed to consider how far the circumstances of 
the caves we have been examining in England appear consistent with 
those of analogous caverns in other parts of the world. The history of 
the diluvian gravel of the Continent, and of the animal remains con¬ 
tained in it, appears altogether identical with that of those in our own 
country; and with respect to the bones that occur in caverns, the chief 
difference seems to be, that on the Continent some of the caves have 
their mouths still open, and have been inhabited also in the post-dilu¬ 
vian period by animals of existing species. Thus at Gailenreuth the 
great extinct bear (Ursus spelaeus) occurs, together with the Yorkshire 
species of extinct hyaena, in a cave, the mouth of which has no appear¬ 
ance of having ever been closed, and which at this moment would, 
probably, have been tenanted by wild beasts, had not the progress of 
human population extirpated them from that part of Germany. 
For the best existing accounts of the cavern at Gailenreuth, which 
I have twice visited in 1816 and 1822, and of which, in Plate XVII. 
I have given a sectional representation, I must refer to Esper’s 
“ Description des Zoolithes et des Cavernes dans le Margraviat de 
Bareuth,” fol. 1774, with fourteen plates of the bones of bears and 
hyaenas; and to the work of Rosenmuller, published at Weimar in 
1804, in folio, with engravings of almost all the bones composing the 
skeleton of the extinct bear, the size of which approached nearly to 
o 2 
