Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/25

Rh while the left hand was supporting the side of the head. The teeth are large and strong, but much used; the front teeth are nearly as thick as ordinary molars. Near the right hand was a crystal of quartz, similar to those found on the rocks around to this day, but pointed at one end, and about two inches long and an inch and a half thick; some suppose this to be the top of the handle of a knife. The head was ornamented with chaplets of deer teeth and shells. By the remains and on the bones is seen the same deposit of red ochre that was noticed on all the other skeletons. Several slabs of stone were found, which seemed to have formed part of a dolmen. The skeleton, however, was not resting in a palæolithic stratum, though it is considered that these remains are pre-neolithic. A few metres below it, however, in a stratum that is decidedly palæolithic, were found several huge mammoth bones—the hip-joint head of the thigh bone (femur) and the socket of the pelvis: beneath these was found the remains of a fire—a line of black in the stratum—and a large flint instrument, thus proving that man was contemporary with the mammoth.

The length, or depth, of this cave was once at least forty-five metres; and its mouth appeared smaller when it opened nearer the sea, before quarrying destroyed it, and, in particular, removed nearly the whole of its eastern side. At present its depth is about twenty metres, though the end is but a mere crack. It now appears as a huge fissure that rends the face of the lower end of the Rochers Rouges for fifteen metres to nearly the height of the cliff; but from the sloping and irregular level of its own earth floor, which rises several yards above that of the base of the cliff, it is only thirty or forty feet high, and narrows at the top to a mere crack. In width it is about four metres, diminishing inward. Within the dark brown mold filling the lowest levels of this cave, which for facility of reference is called No. 5, were found also the skeletons of 1884 and 1892.

The rocks in which these human remains, bones of animals, and flint instruments have from time to time been discovered are situated at the east end of Mentone, and extend toward the sea, which washes their rough rocky beach; they rise on the other side of the little stream of the St. Louis ravine that divides France from Italy, and are therefore on Italian soil. Round their base runs the narrow old Roman road, which crosses a little bridge of the same date, immediately after rounding the corner. These ruddy colored cliffs are composed of the secondary cretaceous limestone, and contain many crevices and small caverns, in which, mixed with the softer earth covering the floor to many yards in depth, have been found from time to time mammalian bones, with shells and Crustacea, imbedded in places in hard sand and calcareous