skeletons) of elephants obtained during these diggings, was extraordinary. Not a few of them are still preserved in the museums of Maestricht and Leyden, together with some horns of deer, bones of the ox-tribe and other mammalia, and a human lower jaw, with teeth. According to Professor Crahay, who published an account of it at the time, this jaw, which is now preserved at Leyden, was found at the depth of nineteen feet from the surface, where the loess joins the underlying gravel, in a stratum of sandy loam resting on gravel, and overlaid by some pebbly and sandy beds. The stratum is said to have been intact and undisturbed, but the human jaw was isolated, the nearest tusk of an elephant being six yards removed from it in horizontal distance.
Most of the other mammalian bones were found, like these human remains, in or near the gravel, but some of the tusks and teeth of elephants were met with much nearer the surface. I visited the site of these fossils in 1860, in company with M. van Binkhorst, and we found the description of the ground, published by the late Professor Crahay of Louvain, to be very correct.[1] The projecting portion of the terrace, which was cut through in making the canal, is called the hill of Caberg, which is flat-topped, sixty feet high, and has a steep slope on both sides towards the alluvial plain. M. van Binkhorst (who is the author of some valuable works on the paleontology of the Maestricht chalk) has recently visited Leyden, and ascertained that the human fossil above mentioned is still entire in the museum of the university. Although we had no opportunity of verifying the authenticity of Professor Crahay's statements, we could see no reason for suspecting the human jaw to belong to a different geological period from that of the extinct elephant. If this were
- ↑ M. van Binkhorst has shown me the original MS. read to the Maestricht Athenæum in 1823. The memoir was published in 1836 in the Bulletin de l'Académie Royale de Belgique, tom. iii. p. 43.
