Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/38

28 guarded as such at Hebron by a Mohammedan mosque, which only the children of the faith and no infidel can pass.

Remarkable vestiges of the cave-life of antiquity may be seen in the rock-hewn city of Petra in Edom, some fifty miles south of the Dead Sea. The valley in which it stood is lined on either side with the remains of tombs, temples, and perhaps habitations, excavated out of the rock. These structures are supposed to date from a remote antiquity. In later times they were faced with architectural fronts of a more or less imposing character. They are believed to have been used chiefly as places of burial. But there is reason to suppose that most of them were originally intended and used as habitations. Many of the chambers have no resemblance to tombs, but are such as a primitive race would construct to live in. Most of these have closets and recesses suitable for family uses, and many have windows in front, which would be superfluous in tombs. It may be that in the course of time, as customs and people changed, these chambers were abandoned for other houses, to be subsequently used as places of sepulture.

Evidences are found in caves the world over of their use by prehistoric men from the stone ages down—so frequently as to indicate that they were at one or more periods the usual dwellings of the race, and archæologists have based upon them the type or types of cave-men. The evidences of human abode are often found mingled with traces of animals, some of extinct species, which seem to have shared man's occupancy or contested with him for it, or to have possessed the caves alternately with, him. They have furnished fruitful fields for archæological and geological research, and the excavation of them has afforded valuable information concerning the condition and surroundings of the most primitive men, and incidentally as to the age in which they lived. The most noted localities where the earlier finds of ancient stone implements were made in France were habitations of cave-dwellers or in the immediate vicinity of such, habitations, and the science of palæolithic arcæhology was thus based in its beginning upon the relics left by men of this type. In Kent's Cavern, Torquay, which was one of the first of these palæolithic abodes to be studied in England, human bones or articles of human manufacture have been found in two or three different strata, the oldest ones under conditions betokening extreme antiquity and in company with the remains of animals that were extinct long before the historical period. The first discoveries were among the earliest evidences that were obtained of man's having had a greater antiquity than had till then been ascribed to him, and were received incredulously by a public which the thought struck as contradictory to revelation. The