e same direction.

As the same chasms may remain open throughout periods of indefinite
duration, the species inhabiting a country may in the meantime be
greatly changed, and thus the remains of animals belonging to very
different epochs may become mingled together in a common tomb. For this
reason it is often difficult to separate the monuments of the human
epoch from those relating to periods long antecedent, and it was not
without great care and skill that Dr. Buckland was enabled to guard
against such anachronisms in his investigations of several of the
English caves. He mentions that human skeletons were found in the cave
of Wokey Hole, near Wells, in the Mendips, dispersed through reddish mud
and clay, and some of them united by stalagmite into a firm osseous
breccia. "The spot on which they lie is within reach of the highest
floods of the adjacent river, and the mud in which they are buried is
evidently fluviatile."[1050]

In speaking of the cave of Paviland on the coast of Glamorganshire the
same author states that the entire mass through which bones were
dispersed appeared to have been disturbed by ancient diggings, so that
the remains of extinct animals had become mixed with recent bones and
shells. In the same cave was a human skeleton, and the remains of recent
testacea of eatable species, which may have been carried in by man.

In several caverns on the banks of the Meuse, near Liege, Dr. Schmerling
has found human bones in the same mud and breccia with those of the
elephant, rhinoceros, bear, and other quadrupeds of extinct species. He
has observed none of the dung of any of these animals: and from this
circumstance, and the appearance of the mud and pebbles, he concludes
that these caverns were never inhabited by wild beasts, but washed in by
a current of water. As the human skulls and bones were in fragments, and
no entire skeleton had been found, he does not believe that these caves
were places of sepulture, but that the human remains were washed in at
the same time as the bones of extinct quadrupeds, and that these lost
species of mammalia co-existed on the earth with man.

_Caverns in the south of France._--Similar associations in the south of
France, of human bones and works of art, with remains of extinct
quadrupeds, have induced other geologists to maintain that man was an
inhabitant of that part of Europe before the rhinoceros, hyaena, tiger,
and many fossil species disappeared. I may first ment