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LONDON:
R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS,
BREAD STREET HILL.
TO
THE BARONESS BURDETT COUTTS,
THE FOUNDER OF THE SCHOLARSHIPS
FOR THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD,
This Work is Dedicated,
AS A SLIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENT FROM HER FIRST SCHOLAR.
PREFACE.
The exploration of caves is rapidly becoming an important field of inquiry, and their contributions to our knowledge of the early history of the sojourn of men in Europe are daily increasing in value and in number. Since the year 1823, when Dr. Buckland published his famous work, the “Reliquiæ Diluvianæ,” no attempt has been made to correlate, and bring into the compass of one work, the crude mass of facts which have been recorded in nearly every country in Europe. In this volume I have attempted to bring the history of cave-exploration down to the knowledge of to-day, and to put its main conclusions before my readers in one connected and continuous narrative. Since Dr. Buckland wrote, the momentous discovery of human relics along with the extinct animals in caves and river deposits has revolutionised the current ideas as to the antiquity and condition of man; and works of art of a high order, showing a familiarity with nature and an aptitude for the delineation of the forms of animals by no means despicable, have been discovered in the caves of Britain, France, Belgium, and Switzerland, that were the dwellings of the primeval European hunters of reindeer and mammoths. The discoveries in Kent’s Hole and in the caves of Belgium led to those in the caves of Brixham and Wookey Hole, and finally to those of Auvergne and the south of France, as well as of Germany and Switzerland.
Archæology, also, by the use of strictly inductive methods, has grown from a mere antiquarian speculation into a science; and its students have proved the truth of the three divisions of human progress familiar to the Greek and Roman philosopher, and expressed in the pages of Hesiod and Lucretius—the Ages of Stone, Bronze and Iron. The subdivision of the first of these into the older, or palæolithic, and newer, or neolithic, by Sir John Lubbock, is the only refinement which has been made in this classification. Sir Charles Lyell has discussed the various problems offered by the general consideration of the first of these divisions in “The Antiquity of Man;” while Sir John Lubbock, in “Prehistoric Man,” has followed Dr. Keller and others in working out the past history of mankind by a comparison of the habitations, tombs, implements and weapons found in Europe, with those of modern savages. This work is intended to be to a considerable extent supplementary to theirs,—to treat of the formation of caves, and of the light thrown by their contents on the sojourn of man in Europe, on the wild animals, and on the changes in climate and geography.