BEARS LIVED AND DIED IN THE CAVES. 
IDS 
M. Rosenmuller is decidedly of opinion with M. Cuvier, that the 
bears’ bones are the remains of animals which lived and died through 
successive generations in the caves in which we find them; nay, 
even that they were also born in the same caves; in proof of which 
he has found some bones of a bear, so small, that it must have died 
immediately after its birth, and other bones of individuals that must 
have died in early life, like the young hyasnas which have been found 
at Kirkdale: and M. Blumenbach expresses precisely the same 
opinion in his first Specimen Archaeologise Telluris, p. 14. 
“ Utut interim sit, speluncarum istarum ratione et ossium ursi- 
norum in iisdem situ persuasus sum, ea, neque ut quorundam ferebat 
opinio ab hominibus illic illata, neque quae aliorum sententia fuit 
a diluvio illuta esse, sed quod et Cl. De Luc asserit, ipsos istos specus 
harum ferarum nativos quondam recessus et postmodum sepulchretum 
fuisse.” 
The above description of the cave at Gailenreuth, extracted prin¬ 
cipally from Rosenmuller, and confirmed by my own observations on the 
spot, may be taken as an example of the general state of the bones in 
the other caves on the Continent, of which it is superfluous here to say 
any thing more than to subjoin a fist of the most important of them, 
may probably be explained by supposing the mouths of the former to have been closed 
and inaccessible in the antediluvian period, and afterwards laid open by denudation. In 
the adjacent valley of the Esback, at the castle of Rabenstein, they occur in caves on 
both sides of a similar valley of denudation; and even admitting them to have been all 
open and accessible in the period above alluded to, it does not follow that they would all 
have been equally tenanted by bears, whose gregarious habits would lead them to prefer 
a frequented den to a solitary one; and this predilection, acting through successive 
generations, would accumulate the bones of hundreds or thousands in one cave, by the 
side of another which may have remained all the while almost wholly unoccupied. 
