been washed out of an older deposit, but were probably clothed with flesh, or at least had the separate bones bound together ' with their natural ligaments' (Lyell, p. 101.). It seems difficult to resist so reasonable a conclusion, and though it is plain that the man and the bear could not have lived in the cave together, it may be that they disputed its occupation, or that the ursine remains were washed in after the cave was deserted by man. No human bones have, we believe, been found in the Brixham cave. After citing this, perhaps the latest, best established, and most satisfactory of the arguments as to human antiquity yet derived from cave evidences, we will not stop to inquire whether Professor Schmerling of Liége in 1833, and Mr. M'Enery of Torquay about the same period, had not already arrived with equal right at the same conclusions long before, which the former at least had confidently but vainly announced to an unbelieving generation. We now acknowledge that they were in all probability justified in their conclusions. Yet these were difficult to establish, and isolated facts must ever be regarded by geologists with the utmost distrust, especially when they are of a nature to disappear from subsequent verification. The evidences of the integrity and superposition of cave deposits, and of the exact conditions of association of the remains, are of so fleeting and so nice a description, as to demand the most circumspect caution in accepting them. Mere reports of workmen avail nothing here. It is on the personal testimony of the explorers of the Brixham cave alone, that we are inclined to accept their important conclusions.

In truth, it is difficult to dispense with ocular proof in such cases; and, failing that evidence, we fall back upon concurrent testimony from many impartial quarters. It was the independent proof from the valleys of Picardy of the association of implements with extinct mammalia, which gave Sir C. Lyell confidence in accepting the results of the Brixham explorations; and, precisely conversely, it was the personal conviction which he acquired at Brixham which induced Dr. Falconer to revisit in 1858 the Abbeville museum, and there find proofs of the same facts, which he seems in 1856 to have seen unconvinced. All this is natural and reasonable. It is the normal progress of science towards the admission of truth by the progressive elimination of legitimate doubts. It may be compared to the hesitation with which the extra-terrestrial origin of meteoric stones was at first received.

Until recently it has been very generally held that the age of bone-cave deposits coincided with, or preceded, that of the 'boulder clay,' making them more ancient therefore than the

flint beds of the Somme and Ouse. But at that time the true age of those beds had not been clearly ascertained, and the fossils which they contain were assumed to belong to the newer Pliocene series. It appears that the researches of Dr. Falconer, in connexion particularly with the varieties of the extinct elephant, have gone far to establish that the bone caves are of the same geological era with those post-pliocene deposits. Granting this, we are met with difficulties in making even a remote approximation to the chronological antiquity of cavern deposits. These difficulties are the same in kind, and almost greater in degree, than those which we met with in contemplating the vast energies which must have been expended in excavating the valley of the Somme in the cases of Amiens and Abbeville. The situation of the limestone caverns is in a great number of cases most remarkable. They open upon inaccessible, or nearly inaccessible, precipices. The expressive sections in Dr. Buckland's Reliquiæ Diluviana' give us a lively conviction of the difficulty of accounting for how animals entered these dens, and how they were afterwards subjected to alluvial processes. We are assured that in many cases no alternative remains but to suppose that the configuration of the country has altered since those times, and that cliffs, now sixty feet high, must have been formed at Brixham since the time. when floods found access to the caves. In the valley of the Meuse, the cliffs upon which the caves open are said to be two hundred feet in vertical height. The difficulty of accounting for such changes by any conceivable duration of existing causes, startles even Sir Charles Lyell from his uniformitarian tranquillity. After stating the last-mentioned fact, he adds:

·

"There appears also in many cases to be such a correspondence in the openings of caverns on opposite sides of some of the valleys, both large and small, as to incline one to suspect that they originally belonged to a series of tunnels and galleries which were continuous before the present system of drainage came into play, or before the existing valleys were scooped out. Other signs of subsequent fluctuation are afforded by gravel containing elephant's bones at slight elevations above the Meuse and several of its tributaries. The loess also in the suburbs and neighbourhood of Liége, occurring at various heights in patches lying at between 20 and 200 feet above the river, cannot be explained without supposing the filling up and re-excavation of the valleys at a period posterior to the washing in of the animal remains into most of the old caverns. It may be objected that, according to the present rate of change, no lapse of ages would suffice to bring about such revolutions in physical geography as we are here contemplating. This may be true. It is more than probable that the rate of change was once far more active than it is now.' (Antiquity of Man, p. 73, 74.)

It is almost unnecessary to insist on the fact that the last sentence annihilates the argument for excessive antiquity-in fact, puts the claimant out of court. There can be no calculation of secular change when violent catastrophes are invoked for the division of the Gordian knot. The case reminds us of the practice of those homoeopathic professors who, whilst no crisis threatens, continue to administer with firm composure trillionths of a grain to their trusting patient; but when emergencies occur, lose confidence in their globules, and resort with precipitation to the vigorous remedies of the orthodox physician.

Before quitting this part of the subject, there are two discoveries in connexion with bone caves which we cannot wholly pass over, since Sir C. Lyell gives them each a prominent place; namely, the skulls of Engis and Neanderthal, and the sepulchre of Aurignac.

Amongst the human relics detected many years ago by Schmerling in the Belgian caves, we ought perhaps to have mentioned sooner that flint implements were so abundant as to have excited comparatively little attention, whilst the bones of Man were rare. Of the latter, we believe that but one skull has been preserved, that of the Engis cave. More lately (in 1857), a skull was found in the cavern of the Neanderthal, near Dusseldorff*, whose peculiarity of form, rather than the geological proofs of its great antiquity, has attracted to it much notice. Sir C. Lyell has devoted more than an entire chapter to the description of these remains, regarded chiefly from an anatomical point of view. It is, in fact, an episode in the treatment of his subject, and belongs rather to the concluding portion of the volume on Darwin's Theory of the Origin of Species,' than to the geological argument of the Antiquity of Man.' Sir C. Lyell relies on the authority of Mr. Huxley in the purely anthropological discussion. A reader unacquainted with the author's predilection for the Darwinian hypothesis might be rather puzzled to account for the insertion in this place of the chapter on the form of these old skulls. But he who knows already the conclusion-which may almost be called a foregone conclusion in the writer's mind, is struck, on the other hand, with the failure in establishing the desired proof which is the tendency of the whole inquiry. It is a curious instance of the struggle, which we often meet with in Sir C. Lyell's very agreeable writings, between the intensity of his prepossessions and the natural candour which is continually making itself seen. There is little or no dispute about the facts. Of the two

* See Antiquity of Man,' p. 92.

skulls that of Engis is the more certainly ancient. It was found associated with the bones of the rhinoceros; though, as we have already observed, this alone is in caves no sure evidence of contemporaneousness. The skull from Neanderthal might apparently be of almost any date, so far as its geological position is concerned. It was carelessly extricated by workmen from the cavern mud, along with other parts of a skeleton which were not recognised as human until after several weeks.* The skull is admitted to be of a very low type of humanity, resembling in some degree the Australian races, yet in cubical capacity it is far superior to certain modern skulls, and has more than double that of the highest order of monkey. Its form is no doubt very strange (surely the shading in the figure, p. 82., of the Antiquity of Man,' must give an unintentional exaggeration of the superciliary ridge!). The Engis skull, on the other hand, presents no anomaly of great moment, and is readily referred by anatomists to the ordinary European race.† It appears, therefore, to be a somewhat unreasonable prepossession to wish to maintain (for we can hardly affirm that Sir C. Lyell directly maintains it), that the less certainly ancient skull is any proof of the gradation of Man into the ape, while the more certainly ancient one in the same district contradicts such an inference. At page 92., Sir C. Lyell puts his argument in a form hardly logical. It seems to amount to this. This skull (of Neanderthal) may either be very ancient or not very ancient. If very ancient, it was a normal skull of the period when Man was nearer the ape than at present; if not very ancient, it was an abnormal skull of that period simulating a return (called atavism') to the structure of the owner's monkey-like progenitors. Thus, whether normal or abnormal, it is to be quoted on Mr. Darwin's side. In other passages, however, Sir C. Lyell, and also his anatomical guide, Professor Huxley, are fairer in their conclusions. On the geological antiquity of the Neanderthal skull, the former says (p. 78.): —

'I think it probable that this fossil may be of about the same age as those found by Schmerling in the Liége caverns; but, as no other animal remains were found with it, there is no proof that it may not be newer. Its position lends no countenance whatever to the supposition of its being more ancient.'

Schaaffhausen in 'Natural History Review,' i. 156.

† Professor Huxley elsewhere describes it as a fair average 'human skull, which might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage.' (Man's Place in Nature, p. 156.)

Professor Huxley says:

The fact that the skulls of one of the purest and most homogeneous of existing races of men can be proved to differ from one another in the same characters, though perhaps not quite to the same extent as the Engis and Neanderthal skulls, seems to me to prohibit any cautious reasoner from affirming the latter to have been necessarily of distinct races.' (Lyell, pp. 88, 89.)

6

And again,

The comparatively large cranial capacity of the Neanderthal skull, overlaid though it may be by pithecoid [ape-like] bony walls, and the completely human proportions of the accompanying limbbones, together with the very fair developement of the Engis skull, clearly indicate that the first traces of the primordial stock whence Man has proceeded need no longer be sought, by those who entertain any form of the doctrine of progressive developement, in the newest tertiaries, but that they may be looked for in an epoch more distant from the age of the Elephas primigenius than that is from us.'* (Antiquity of Man, p. 89.)

Sir C. Lyell, in his resumé of his arguments on the antiquity of Man, in chapter xix., gives the following conclusions on the subject of these skulls, which it will be seen are in conformity with Mr. Huxley's, and betray none of the leaning to the Darwinian inference which we have already abridged from his fifth chapter:

"The human skeletons of the Belgian caverns, of times coeval with the mammoth and other extinct mammalia, do not betray any signs of a marked departure in their structure, whether of skull or limb, from the modern standard of certain living races of the human family. As to the remarkable Neanderthal skeleton, it is at present too isolated and exceptional, and its age too uncertain, to warrant us in relying on its abnormal and ape-like characters, as bearing on the question whether the farther back we trace Man into the past, the more we shall find him approach in bodily conformation to those species of the anthropoid quadrumana which are most akin to him in structure.' (P. 375.)

The prominent place given in the Antiquity of Man' to

* In his work on Man's Place in Nature,' Professor Huxley says, with equal candour: In no sense then can the Neanderthal bones 'be regarded as the remains of a being intermediate between men 'and apes. At most they demonstrate the existence of a man' [observe, not of a race of men] whose skull may be said to revert somewhat to the pithecoid type.' And again, The fossil remains ' of Man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form by the modification of which he 'has probably become what he is.' (Man's Place in Nature, pp. 157159.)