Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/26

 matter, mixed with flint instruments. Thus they were known in 1848, yet even as early as the last century De Saussure had drawn the attention of the scientific world to their existence. But in 1858 they were first actually described by M. François Forel, a Swiss. M. Rivière commenced excavations in 1869; it was not, however, till 1872, while making the cutting for the railway, that the first human skeletons became unearthed by him on March 26th, six metres and a half below the level of the older excavations, in cave No. 4. Beside the one on which M. Rivière wrote his monograph in 1873, two others were discovered lying near it about the same time, but so badly were they broken that he made mention of only that one, which is now in the Natural History Museum of Paris. On its head were found some shells forming a circlet, as also some carved reindeer teeth in the same position, while beneath the head was found a curved flint blade. It was supposed to have been the skeleton of an Ethiopian, at first, but there were differences that marked a race that has now passed away, or become somewhat altered: the orbital cavities were larger, and its height, though not great, was abnormal. We pass over this skeleton, and all that M. Rivière has already written about it, and all the names that he has given to the flint and