Skeleton lately found at the Tilbury Docks , Essex. 145 
cave and its surroundings is given in Sir Charles Lyell’s 
‘Antiquity of Man’ (3rd ed., p. 76). Lyell remarks that the 
body may possibly have been washed into the cavern from 
above—through the fissure communicating with the surface, 
which slopes downwards to the cave at an angle averaging 
about 45 degrees. But the most simple and probable 
explanation of the existence of the skeleton in the cave 
seems to be that the man had permanent or temporary 
quarters there, and died therein quietly at last. For the 
skull and the other bones of the skeleton were found by the 
quarrymen working in them neighbourhood to be lying 
together in the same horizontal plane; and it is supposed 
(according to Lyell) that the skeleton was complete when 
found, but that “the workmen, ignorant of its value, scattered 
and lost most of the bones, preserving only the larger ones.” 
And it seems almost impossible that the skeleton would have 
been either perfect or horizontal after a prolonged journey of 
weeks or months from the top of the irregular, jagged fissure 
to the bottom. It was covered by loam about 5 ft. thick, 
which had no doubt been washed down from the surface 
through the fissure; but there was no crust of stalagmite 
overlying the loam, and no bones of other animals were found 
in it. The antiquity of the Neanderthal man is thus marked 
only by the deposition of this loam above him. And the 
length of time this deposition occupied is a question without 
any possibility of even an approximate answer, on account of 
the probable variations in the capacity of the fissure, from 
time to time, as a channel for loam. There is nothing, how¬ 
ever, to suggest an antiquity greater than, if so great as, that 
of the Tilbury man. The words of Dr. Schaaffhausen (trans¬ 
lated by Mr. Busk) on this point are given in Prof. Huxley’s 
book on ‘ Man’s Place in Nature,’ p. 129. He says :—& These 
remarkable human remains belonged to a period antecedent 
to the time of the Celts and Germans, and were in all 
probability derived from one of the wild races of North¬ 
western Europe spoken of by Latin writers, and which were 
encountered as autochthones by the German immigrants.” 
It is evident, therefore,Hhat the true importance of both 
L 
