132 
BLOCK OF STONE POLISHED BY BEARS. 
may at any time have entered spontaneously, or been dragged into it, 
the mouth being so large, and having no appearance of ever having 
been shut up. 
Its most remarkable phenomenon is the polished surface of the 
great insulated block of stone, which stands like a sarcophagus in the 
middle of the side chamber. Not being aware of it at the time I was 
there, I did not observe this circumstance myself, but Bosenmuller 
states, and Goldfuss repeats it, that the surface of this block is all over 
smooth, as if polished (glatt wie polirt) in a manner which must be 
attributed to some cause external to the rock itself, and which its 
place and circumstances seem to induce us to refer to no other than 
friction from the skin and paws of the antediluvian bears*. (Goldfuss 
Taschenbuch, p. 120.) 
* It is only necessary to examine the habits of modern bears as delineated after 
nature in Ridinger’s excellent engravings of wild animals, or to have seen the agility and 
apparent delight with which the bears in the Jardin du Roi at Paris climb up a tree 
placed for this purpose in their open den, to feel assured that if the habits of antediluvian 
bears were at all like those of existing species, such a pedestal as that we are speaking of 
would have been subjected to continual friction from the ascending and descending of 
these animals, whilst they inhabited the den : see Ridinger’s Plates, No. 31, where he re¬ 
presents the interior of a den of bears, in which most of them are climbing up rocks, and 
one is in the very act of mounting a pedestal similar to that in Zahnloch. The numbers 
also in which he represents them as herded together (seven or eight in the same cave), 
show them to be gregarious, and illustrate the otherwise almost inexplicable fact of the 
remains of so many hundred bears being assembled together in four or five such caves as 
those of Scharzfeld, Baumans Hohle, Zahnloch, Gailenreuth, and Kiihloch. 
