Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/91

Rh the bones of animals which may be carried away during floods.

The manner in which some of the large thigh and shank bones of the rhinoceros and other pachyderms are rounded, while some of the smaller bones of the same creatures, and of the hyæna, bear, and horse, are reduced to pebbles, shows that they were often transported for some distance in the channels of torrents, before they found a resting-place.

When we desire to reason or speculate on the probable antiquity of human bones found fossil in such situations as the caverns near Liége, there are two classes of evidence to which we may appeal for our guidance. First, considerations of the time required to allow of many species of carnivorous and herbivorous animals, which flourished in the cave period, becoming first scarce, and then so entirely extinct as we have seen that they had become before the era of the Danish peat and Swiss lake dwellings: secondly, the great number of centuries necessary for the conversion of the physical geography of the Liége district from its ancient to its present configuration; so many old underground channels, through which brooks and rivers flowed in the cave period, being now laid dry and choked up.

The great alterations which have taken place in the shape of the valley of the Meuse and some of its tributaries are often demonstrated by the abrupt manner in which the mouths of fossiliferous caverns open in the face of perpendicular precipices 200 feet or more in height above the present streams. 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