Page:Palæolithic Man and Terramara Settlements in Europe.djvu/146

92 Schmerling's Researches.

In 1829 Dr Schmerling commenced his memorable researches in the numerous caverns that border on the valleys of the Meuse and its tributaries, in the province of Liége, and gave descriptive accounts of the contents of more than forty of them. The evidence of man's antiquity revealed by his investigations, consisted of flint implements and the remains of several human skeletons, associated with the bones of hyæna, lion, rhinoceros, mammoth, bear, and reindeer. In the Engis cavern he disinterred the remains of at least three human skeletons. The skull of one of them, that of a young person, lay by the side of a mammoth tooth, but it fell to pieces in the course of being extracted. Another skull "was buried 5 feet deep in breccia, in which the tooth of a rhinoceros, several bones of a horse, and some of the reindeer together with some ruminants occurred." This was the only skull preserved by Schmerling which was in a "sufficient state of integrity to enable the anatomist to speculate on the race to which it belonged" (Figs. 17 and 18) a process to which it was subsequently subjected by Professor Huxley, many years after its discovery, in his celebrated work, Man's Place in Nature, chap. 3.

As its anatomical characteristics are not very different from those of a modern European skull, it is unnecessary to dwell on this phase of the subject. After observing that assuredly