Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/205

Rh in his restoration of the cave. His artist also has inadvertently, in the same drawing, delineated the arched grotto as if it were shaped very regularly and smoothly, like a finished piece of masonry, whereas the surface was in truth as uneven and irregular as are the roofs of all natural grottos.

There was no stalagmite in the grotto, and M. Lartet, an experienced investigator of ossiferous caverns in the south of France, came to the conclusion that all the bones and soil found in the inside were artificially introduced. The substratum, b, fig. 25, which remained after the skeletons had been removed, was about two feet thick. In it were found about ten detached human bones, including a molar tooth; and M. Delesse ascertained by careful analysis of one of these, as well as of the bones of a rhinoceros, bear, and some other extinct animals, that they all contained precisely the same proportion of azote, or had lost an equal quantity of their animal matter. My friend Mr. Evans, before cited, has suggested to me that such a fact, taken alone, may not be conclusive in favour of the equal antiquity of the human and other remains, although it has no doubt an important bearing on the case, because, had the human skeletons been found to contain less gelatine than those of the extinct mammalia, it would have shown that they were the more modern of the two. But it is possible that after a bone has gone on losing its animal matter up to a certain point, it may then part with no more so long as it continues enveloped in the same matrix, so that if all the bones have lain for many thousands of years in a particular soil, they may all have reached long ago the maximum of decomposition attainable in such a matrix. In the present case, however, the proof of the contemporaneousness of man and the extinct animals does not depend simply on the identity of their mineral condition. The chemical analysis of M. Delesse is only a fact in corroboration of a great mass of other evidence.

Mixed with the human bones inside the grotto first