(* "Principles" 9th edition page 739.)
"The flint hatchets and arrow-heads," he said, "and the pointed bones and coarse pottery of many French and English caves, agree precisely in character with those found in the tumuli, and under the dolmens (rude altars of unhewn stone) of the primitive inhabitants of Gaul, Britain, and Germany. The human bones, therefore, in the caves which are associated with such fabricated objects, must belong not to antediluvian periods, but to a people in the same stage of civilization as those who constructed the tumuli and altars."
"In the Gaulish monuments," he added, "we find, together with the objects of industry above mentioned, the bones of wild and domestic animals of species now inhabiting Europe, particularly of deer, sheep, wild boars, dogs, horses, and oxen. This fact has been ascertained in Quercy and other provinces; and it is supposed by antiquaries that the animals in question were placed beneath the Celtic altars in memory of sacrifices offered to the Gaulish divinity Hesus, and in the tombs to commemorate funeral repasts, and also from a superstition prevalent among savage nations, which induces them to lay up provisions for the manes of the dead in a future life. But in none of these ancient monuments have any bones been found of the elephant, rhinoceros, hyaena, tiger, and other quadrupeds, such as are found in caves, which might certainly have been expected had these species continued to flourish at the time that this part of Gaul was inhabited by Man."*
(* Desnoyers, "Bulletin de la Societe Geologique de France"
tome 2 page 252; and article on Caverns, "Dictionnaire
Universelle d'Histoire Naturelle" Paris 1845.)
After giving no small weight to the arguments of M. Desnoyers, and the writings of Dr. Buckland on the same subject, and myself visiting several caves in Germany, I came to the opinion that the human bones mixed with those of extinct animals, in osseous breccias and cavern mud, in different parts of Europe, were probably not coeval. The caverns having been at one period the dens of wild beasts, and having served at other times as places of human habitation, worship, sepulture, concealment, or defence, one might easily conceive that the bones of Man and those of animals, which were strewed over the floors of subterranean cavities, or which had fallen into tortuous rents connecting them with the surface, might, when swept away by floods, be mingled in one promiscuous heap in the same ossiferous mud or breccia.*
(* "Principles" 9th edition page 740.)
That such intermixtures have really taken place in some caverns, and that geologists have occasionally been deceived, and have assigned to one and the same period fossils which had really been introduced at successive times, will readily be conceded. But of late years we have obtained convincing proofs, as we shall see in the sequel, that the mammoth, and many other extinct mammalian species very common in caves, occur also in undisturbed alluvium, embedded in such a manner with works of art, as to leave no room for doubt that Man and the mammoth coexisted; Such discoveries have led me, and other geologists, to reconsider the evidence previously derived from caves brought forward in proof of the high antiquity of Man. With a view of re-examining this evidence, I have lately explored several caverns in Belgium and other countries, and re-read the principal memoirs and treatises treating of the fossil remains preserved in them, the results of which inquiries I shall now proceed to lay before the reader.
RESEARCHES, IN 1833-1834, OF DR. SCHMERLING IN THE CAVERNS NEAR LIEGE.
The late Dr. Schmerling of Liege, a skilful anatomist and palaeontologist, after devoting several years to the exploring of the numerous ossiferous caverns which border the valleys of the Meuse and its tributaries, published two volumes descriptive of the contents of more than forty caverns. One of these volumes consisted of an atlas of plates, illustrative of the fossil bones.*
(* "Recherches sur les Ossements fossiles decouverts dans
les Cavernes de la Province de Liege", Liege 1833-1834.)