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Ossiferous breccias are not confined to Europe, but occur in all parts of the globe; and those discovered in fissures and caverns in Australia correspond closely in character with what has been called the bony breccia of the Mediterranean, in which the fragments of bone and rock are firmly bound together by a red ochreous cement.
We know, however, that, before the Recent period, that continent was peopled with large kangaroos, and other herbivorous and carnivorous marsupials, of species long since extinct, their remains having been discovered in ossiferous caverns.
It is just, at any rate, to recognize that even in his remotest resorts for temporary rest and retirement from the cares of government, he led the same kind of plain, modest life, spending all his leisure hours in arranging his collections of natural history, more especially the palaeo-ethnological or prehistoric, for which the ossiferous caverns of the Island of Capri supplied him with abundant materials.
There was no stalagmite in the grotto, and M. Lartet, an experienced investigator of ossiferous caverns in the south of France, came to the conclusion that all the bones and soil found in the inside were artificially introduced.
I was not aware at the time that flint tools had been met with in the same bone-deposit. The ossiferous caves of the peninsula of Gower in Glamorganshire have been diligently explored of late years by Dr. Falconer and Lieutenant-Colonel E.R. Wood, who have thoroughly investigated the contents of many which were previously unknown. Among these Dr.
Schmerling of Liege, a skilful anatomist and palaeontologist, after devoting several years to the exploring of the numerous ossiferous caverns which border the valleys of the Meuse and its tributaries, published two volumes descriptive of the contents of more than forty caverns.
Besides the bear and hyena, upwards of a hundred species of extinct animals have been found in the ossiferous caves of Great Britain, among them being those of the elephant and a rhinoceros.
It was folly, folly, folly! nothing else! I am rather inclined to admit the existence of some animal resembling in structure the human race of some monkey of the first geological epochs, like that discovered by M. Lartet in the ossiferous deposit of Sansan. But this animal, or being, whichsoever it was, surpassed in height all things known to modern science. Never mind.
Man is an old-world type, and it is not in Brazil, the only equatorial region where ossiferous caverns have yet been explored, that the discovery, in a fossil state, of extinct forms allied to the human, could be looked for.
About ten years ago, a canal was made, several hundred yards in length, for the purpose of leading the waters of the Axe to a paper-mill, now occupying the middle of the ravine. In carrying out this work, about 12 feet of the left bank was cut away, and a cavernous fissure, choked up to the roof with ossiferous loam, was then, for the first time, exposed to view.
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