HKB
the tunnels of communication, may at the first period be entirely choked up with transported matter, so as not to allow the subsequent passage of water in the same direction.
As the same chasms may remain open throughout periods of indefinite duration, the species inhabiting a country may in the meantime be greatly changed, and thus the remains of animals belonging to very different epochs may become mingled together in a common tomb. For this reason it is often difficult to separate the monuments of the human epoch from those relating to periods long antecedent, and it was not without great care and skill that Dr. Buckland was enabled to guard against such anachronisms in his investigations of several of the English caves. He mentions that human skeletons were found in the cave of Wokey Hole, near Wells, in the Mendips, dispersed through reddish mud and clay, and some of them united by stalagmite into a firm osseous breccia. "The spot on which they lie is within reach of the highest floods of the adjacent river, and the mud in which they are buried is evidently fluviatile."[1050]
In speaking of the cave of Paviland on the coast of Glamorganshire the same author states that the entire mass through which bones were dispersed appeared to have been disturbed by ancient diggings, so that the remains of extinct animals had become mixed with recent bones and shells. In the same cave was a human skeleton, and the remains of recent testacea of eatable species, which may have been carried in by man.
In several caverns on the banks of the Meuse, near Liege, Dr. Schmerling has found human bones in the same mud and breccia with those of the elephant, rhinoceros, bear, and other quadrupeds of extinct species. He has observed none of the dung of any of these animals: and from this circumstance, and the appearance of the mud and pebbles, he concludes that these caverns were never inhabited by wild beasts, but washed in by a current of water. As the human skulls and bones were in fragments, and no entire skeleton had been found, he does not believe that these caves were places of sepulture, but that the human remains were washed in at the same time as the bones of extinct quadrupeds, and that these lost species of mammalia co-existed on the earth with man.
Caverns in the south of France.--Similar associations in the south of France, of human bones and works of art, with remains of extinct quadrupeds, have induced other geologists to maintain that man was an inhabitant of that part of Europe before the rhinoceros, hyaena, tiger, and many fossil species disappeared. I may first mention the cavern of Bize, in the department of Aude, where M. Marcel de Serres met with a small number of human bones mixed with those of extinct animals and with land shells. They occur in a calcareous stony mass, bound together by a cement of stalagmite. On examining the same caverns, M. Tournal found not only in these calcareous beds, but also in a black mud which overlies a red osseous mud, several human teeth, together with broken angular fragments of a rude kind of pottery, and also recent marine and terrestrial shells. The teeth preserve their enamel; but the fangs are so much altered as to adhere strongly when applied to the tongue. Of the terrestrial shells thus associated with the bones and pottery, the most common are Cyclostoma elegans, Bulimus decollatus, Helix nemoralis*, and H. nitida. Among the marine are found Pecten jacobaeus, Mytilus edulis, and *Natica mille-punctata, all of them eatable kinds, and which may have been brought there for food. Bones were found in the same mass belonging to three new species of deer, the brown bear (Ursus arctoideus), and the wild bull (Bos urus), formerly a native of Germany.[1051]