n 1859, to the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, says: 'The
great point was not to leave the workmen for a single instant.'

But the most remarkable, not to say startling revelations of the whole
book, are those pertaining to the discovery of an ancient place of
sepulture at Auvignac, in the south of France. Here we seem to be
brought, as it were, face to face with the denizens of the departed
ages, and to have them start up from their ancient tombs to tell the
story of their death and sepulture. We enter this old burial place with
feelings of more strange and solemn awe than we could have in threading
the catacombs of Rome. An obscure village at the foot of the Pyrenees
reveals in its precincts a more astounding history than all the
monuments and mausoleums of the 'eternal' city.

In the year 1852, a laborer named Bonnemaison, employed in repairing
roads, observed that rabbits, when hotly pursued by the sportsman, ran
into a hole which they had burrowed in a talus of small fragments of
limestone and earthy matter lodged in a depression on the face of a
steep escarpment of nummulitic limestone which forms the bank of a small
brook near the town of Auvignac. On reaching as far into the opening as
the length of his arm, he drew out to his surprise one of the long bones
of the human skeleton; and his curiosity being excited, and having a
suspicion that the hole communicated with a subterranean cavity, he
commenced digging a trench through the middle of the talus, and in a few
hours found himself opposite a heavy slab of rock, placed vertically
against the entrance. Having removed this, he discovered on the other
side of it an arched cavity, seven or eight feet in its greatest height,
ten in width, and seven in horizontal depth. It was almost filled with
bones, among which were two entire skulls, which he recognized at once
as human. The people of Auvignac flocked in astonishment to the spot,
and Dr. Amiel, the mayor, having first ascertained as a medical man and
anatomist that the relics contained the bones of seventeen human
skeletons of both sexes and all ages, ordered them all to be reinterred
in the parish cemetery.

In 1860, M. Lartet, a distinguished French savan, examined thoroughly
the remaining contents of the cavern and its surroundings and
approaches. He found, on removing the talus which filled up the
depression on the face of the rock, a level terrace leading to the mouth
of the cave. On this terrace was a