CAVE OF GAILENREUTH. POSITION OF ITS MOUTH. 133 
CAVE OF GAILENREUTH. 
I have already mentioned this cave, as the most remarkable in the 
country we are now speaking of, for the quantity and high state of 
perfection of the bones that have been extracted from it, and for the 
descriptions that have been given of them by Esper, Rosenmuller, and 
other writers. I had visited it in 1816 with less attention to its 
minute details, and had then overlooked the circumstance of the bed 
of mud and pebbles, which I now find to be mixed with the bones, 
and placed between the stalagmitic crust and native rock, which forms 
the actual floor of the cavern; in other respects the drawing I have 
given in my first edition in the Phil. Trans. 1822, differs not materially 
from that which I have now substituted for it at Plate XVII. 
Its mouth is situated in a perpendicular rock, in the highest part of 
the cliffs which form the left side of the valley of the Weissent River, 
at an elevation of more than 300 feet above its bed. (See Plate XIX. 
in the corner of which is a view of it, copied from a print in Esper.) 
This valley being, as I before stated, simply a valley of denudation, the 
present entrance could not have been the original one, as it existed 
before the excavation of the valley; we now enter by an aperture 
about seven feet high and twelve feet broad in the cliff just men¬ 
tioned, and close to it observe an open fissure, rising from the cave 
toward the table land immediately above; this fissure is also re¬ 
presented in the view of the mouth of the cave I have just referred to, 
and by it, or by other similar fissures, the mud and pebbles we shall 
