layer of charcoal and ashes, eight
inches thick, containing fragments of broken, burnt, and gnawed bones of
_extinct and recent mammalia_, in all some nineteen species, and some
seventy or eighty individuals. Also in the same deposit were
hearthstones, and works of art, flint knives, projectiles, sling-stones,
and chips. Many of the bones of the extinct herbivora were streaked, as
if the flesh had been scraped off them by a flint instrument, and others
were split open, as if for the purpose of extracting the marrow. Inside
the grotto were two or three feet of made earth mixed with human and a
few animal bones of extinct and recent species. None of them, however,
burnt or gnawed; and numerous small flat plates of a white shelly
substance made of some species of cockle, perforated in the middle as if
for the purpose of being strung into a bracelet; also some mementos and
memorials of the chase and the sepulture. Did no opposing traditions
stand in the way, we are quite sure the evidence elicited from this
examination would at once fix its character as a burial place, of an
antiquity coeval with the existence of the great extinct mammalia of the
post-pliocene period. It, however, contains some features of special
interest. In the words of Sir Charles Lyell:

'The Auvignac cave adds no new species to the list of extinct
quadrupeds, which we have elsewhere, and by independent evidence,
ascertained to have once flourished contemporaneously with man. But
if the fossil memorials have been correctly interpreted--if we have
here before us at the northern base of the Pyrenees a sepulchral
vault with skeletons of human beings, consigned by friends and
relatives to their last resting place--if we have also at the
portal of the tomb the relics of funeral feasts, and within it
indications of viands destined for the use of the departed on their
way to the land of spirits; while among the funeral gifts are
weapons wherewith in other fields to chase the gigantic deer, the
cave lion, the cave bear, and woolly rhinoceros--we have at last
succeeded in tracing back the sacred rites of burial, and, more
interesting still, a belief in a future state, to times long
anterior to those of history and tradition. Rude and superstitious
as may have been the savage of that remote era, he still deserved,
by cherishing the hopes of a hereafter, the epithet of 'noble,'