cavern occurs in Jurassic limestone, at a slight elevation above the Cure, a small tributary of the Yonne, which last joins the Seine near Fontainebleau, about forty miles south of Paris. The lowest formation in the cavern resembles the 'diluvium gris' of Paris, being composed of granitic materials, and like it derived chiefly from the waste of the crystalline rocks of the Morvan. In it have been found the two branches of a human lower jaw with teeth well-preserved, and the bones of the Elephas primigenius, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, Ursus spelæus, Hyæna spelæa, and Cervus Tarandus, all specifically determined by M. Lartet. I have been shown this collection of fossils by M. de Vibraye, and remarked that the human and other remains were in the same condition and of the same colour.
Above the grey gravel is a bed of red alluvium, made up of fragments of Jura limestone, in a red argillaceous matrix, in which were embedded several flint knives, with bones of the reindeer and horse, but no extinct mammalia. Over this, in a higher bed of alluvium, were several polished hatchets of the more modern type called 'celts,' and above all loam or cave-mud, in which were Gallo-Roman antiquities.[1]
The French geologists have made as yet too little progress in identifying the age of the successive deposits of ancient alluvium of various parts of the basin of the Seine, to enable us to speculate with confidence as to the coincidence in date of the granitic gravel with human bones of the Grotte d'Arcy and the stone-hatchets buried in 'grey diluvium' of La Motte Piquet, before mentioned; but as the associated extinct mammalia are of the same species in both localities, I feel strongly inclined to believe that the stone hatchets found by M. Grosse at Paris, and the human bones discovered by M. de Vibraye, may be referable to the same period.
- ↑ Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France, 1860.
