Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/83

Rh The incompleteness of each skeleton was especially ascertained in regard to the human subjects, Dr. Schmerling being careful, whenever a fragment of such presented itself, to explore the cavern himself, and see whether any other bones of the same skeleton could be found. In the Engis cavern, distant about eight miles to the south-west of Liége, on the left bank of the Meuse, the remains of at least three human individuals were disinterred. The skull of one of these, that of a young person, was embedded by the side of a mammoth's tooth. It was entire, but so fragile, that nearly all of it fell to pieces during its extraction. Another skull, that of an adult individual (see fig. 2, p. 81), and the only one preserved by Dr. Schmerling in a sufficient state of integrity to enable the anatomist to speculate on the race to which it belonged, was buried five feet deep in a breccia, in which the tooth of a rhinoceros, several bones of a horse, and some of the reindeer, together with some ruminants, occurred. This skull, now in the museum of the University of Liége, is figured in Chap. V., where further observations will be offered on its anatomical character, after a fuller account of the contents of the Liége caverns has been laid before the reader.

On the right bank of the Meuse, on the opposite side of the river to Engis, is the cavern of Engihoul. Both were observed to abound greatly in the bones of extinct animals mingled with those of man; but with this difference, that whereas in the Engis cave there were several human crania and very few other bones, in Engihoul there occurred numerous bones of the extremities belonging to at least three human individuals, and only two small fragments of a cranium. The like capricious distribution held good in other caverns, especially with reference to the cave-bear, the most frequent of the extinct mammalia. Thus, for example in the cave of Chokier, skulls of the bear were few, and other parts of the skeleton abundant, whereas in several other