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Earliest Discoveries in Caves of Languedoc of Human Remains with Bones of extinct Mammalia. Researches in 1833 of Dr. Schmerling in the Liege Caverns. Scattered Portions of Human Skeletons associated with Bones of Elephant and Rhinoceros. Distribution and probable Mode of Introduction of the Bones. Implements of Flint and Bone. Schmerling's Conclusions as to the Antiquity of Man ignored.
My friend M. Lartet, guided by Schmerling's figures of the teeth of this species, suggests, and I have little doubt with good reason, that they appertain to the porcupine, a genus found fossil in Pleistocene deposits of certain caverns in the south of France. In the year 1833, I passed through Liege, on my way to the Rhine, and conversed with Dr.
The writer briefly criticises the drawings which illustrate Schmerling's work, and affirms that the "human cranium is a little longer than it is represented" in Schmerling's figure. The only other remark worth quoting is this: "The aspect of the human bones differs little from that of the cave bones, with which we are familiar, and of which there is a considerable collection in the same place.
Hilaire's remarks are, it will be observed, little but an echo of the philosophic doubts of the describer and discoverer of the remains. As to the critique upon Schmerling's figures, I find that the side view given by the latter is really about 3/10ths of an inch shorter than the original, and that the front view is diminished to about the same extent.
A very important step in this new direction was made thirteen years after the publication of Schmerling's researches, by M. Boucher de Perthes, who found in ancient alluvium at Abbeville, in Picardy, some flint implements, the relative antiquity of which was attested by their geological position.
The lines of fracture which remain between the coadjusted pieces of the skull, and are faithfully displayed in Schmerling's figure, are readily traceable in the cast. The sutures are also discernible, but the complex disposition of their serrations, shown in the figure, is not obvious in the cast.
Schmerling had found in the cave of Engis, in Westphalia, fossil bones of even greater significance. Schmerling's explorations had been made with the utmost care, and patience. At Engis he had found human bones, including skulls, intermingled with those of extinct mammals of the mammoth period in a way that left no doubt in his mind that all dated from the same geological epoch.
They confirm Schmerling's doctrine, that most of the materials, organic and inorganic, now filling the caverns, have been washed into them through narrow vertical or oblique fissures, the upper extremities of which are choked up with soil and gravel, and would scarcely ever be discoverable at the surface, especially in so wooded a country.
I also came across Friedrich Uhl again, an old acquaintance who was now editing a political paper called Der Botschafter with Julius Frobel under Schmerling's auspices. He placed his journal at my disposal, and made me give him the first act of the libretto of Meistersinger for his feuilleton. Whereupon my friends chose to think that Hanslick grew more and more venomous.
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