Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/193

Rh Palermo. If in the neighbourhood of that city we proceed from the sea inland, ascending a sloping terrace, composed of the marine Newer Pliocene strata, we reach about a mile from the shore, and at the height of about one hundred and eighty feet above it, a precipice of limestone, at the base of which appear the entrances of several caves. In that of San Ciro, on the east side of the bay, we find at the bottom sand with marine shells, forty species of which have been examined, and found almost all to agree specifically with mollusca now inhabiting the Mediterranean. Higher in position, and resting on the sand, is a breccia, composed of pieces of limestone, quartz, and schist in a matrix of brown marl, through which land shells are dispersed, together with bones of two species of hippopotamus, as determined by Dr. Falconer. Certain bones of the skeleton were counted in such numbers as to prove that they must have belonged to several hundred individuals. With these were associated the remains of Elephas antiquus, and bones of the genera Bos, Cervus, Sus, Ursus, Canis, and a large Felis. Some of these bones have been rolled as if partially subjected to the action of water, and may have been introduced by streams through rents in the hippurite limestone; but there is now no running water in the neighbourhood, no river such as the hippopotamus might frequent, not even a small brook, so that the physical geography of the district must have been altogether changed since the time when such remains were swept into fissures, or into the channels of engulfed rivers.

No proofs seem yet to have been found of the existence of man at the period when the hippopotamus and Elephas antiquus flourished at San Ciro. But there is another cave called the Grotto di Maccagnone, which much resembles it in geological position, on the opposite or west side of the Bay of Palermo, near Carini. In the bottom of this cave a bone deposit like that of San Giro occurs, and above it other