Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/191

Rh had been washed into the rent with other bones, and with angular fragments of limestone, and all enveloped in the same ochreous mud. Among the other bones, which were not numerous, were those of the cave-bear, wolf, fox, ox, stag, and field-mouse. But the discovery of most importance, as bearing on the subject of the present work, is the occurrence in a newly-discovered cave, called Long Hole, by Colonel Wood, in 1861, of the remains of two species of rhinoceros, R. tichorhinus and R. hemitœchus Falconer, in an undisturbed deposit, in the lower part of which were some well-shaped flint knives, evidently of human workmanship. It is clear from their position that man was coeval with these two species. We have elsewhere independent proofs of his coexistence with every other species of the cave-fauna of Glamorganshire; but this is the first well-authenticated example of the occurrence of R. hemitœchus in connection with human implements.

In the fossil fauna of the valley of the Thames, Rhinoceros leptorhinus was mentioned as occurring at Gray's Thurrock with Elephas antiquus. Dr. Falconer, in a memoir which he is now preparing for the press on the European pliocene and post-pliocene species of the genus Rhinoceros, has shown that, under the above name of R. leptorhinus, three distinct species have been confounded by Cuvier, Owen, and other palæontologists:— R. Megarhinus Christol, being the original and typical R. leptorhinus of Cuvier, founded on Cortesi's Monte Zago cranium, and the only pliocene, or post-pliocene European species, that had not a nasal septum.—Gray's Thurrock, &c.

R. hemitœchus Falconer, in which the ossification of the septum dividing the nostrils is incomplete in the middle, besides other cranial and dental characters distinguishing it from R. tichorhinus, accompanies Elephas antiquus in most of the oldest British bone-caves, such as Kirkdale, Cefn,