Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 35.djvu/873

Rh the Celtic or cognate Celtic peoples who invaded Europe, also in the Neolithic age, the former being identical with those of the interments in the long barrows, and the latter with those of the round barrows and of the tumuli of the Bronze age in Britain explored by the Rev. W. Greenwell. Both these peoples used caves for sepulchres in Spain, France, and Belgium in the Neolithic age.

From these considerations I find it impossible to follow MM. de Quatrefages and Hamy in their ethnological inferences, which are based on the assumption that in the above cases the human remains belong to Palæolithic men, who lived on in the same area through the stupendous changes which banished some and destroyed other Pleistocene Mammalia—changes in geography and in climate—into the Neolithic age, without, be it remarked, preserving any traces of the art of reproducing animal forms or of the ordinary Palæolithic implements of the men of the caves. I am unable to believe with M. de Quatrefages that any of the present inhabitants of Belgium can be traced as far back as the Palæolithic age, or that they have withstood in their present homes all the changes and invasions which have happened since the Reindeer-hunter camped in the caves of the Lesse. It is to me improbable in itself, and unsupported by satisfactory proof. The few human bones discovered in caves, and of undoubted Palæolithic age, seem to me too fragmentary to offer any satisfactory basis for arriving at any ethnological conclusion as to the Palæolithic races of men in Europe.

1. It now remains for us to sum up the results of this inquiry into the Pleistocene strata of the caves of Cresswell Crags. From the preceding pages it will be seen that at the time the red clay and the ferruginous sand were being accumulated in Mother Grundy's Parlour by the action of water, the Hippopotamus and leptorhine Rhinoceros, the Hyæna and the Bison haunted the wooded valleys of the basin of the upper Trent, while we may mark the absence of Palæolithic Man and the Reindeer. Hyænas were abundant, while Horses were absent.

2. Then followed a time, represented in all the caverns by the red sand, when the Mammoth, Woolly Rhinoceros, Horse, and Reindeer haunted the district round Cresswell Crags, and fell a prey sometimes to the hyænas, and at others to the hunter, whose implements of quartzite prove him to belong to the same peoples who have left their implements in the river-deposits.

3. Lastly we have the Palæolithic hunter, represented, in the breccia and upper cave-earth of the Robin-Hood and Church-Hole caves, by flint implements of a higher order, like those found in Solutré (type "Solutrien" of Mortillet), accompanied by implements of bone and antler and the incised figure of a horse, which proves them to have possessed the same artistic faculty of reproducing the forms of animals so remarkable in the frequenters of the caves of the South of France, Switzerland, and Belgium.

The subsequent history of the caves in the prehistoric and historic