. Evidence as to man's place in nature . thevalley of the Meuse, in Belgium, and of the Neanderthalnear Diisseldorf, the geological relations of which have beenexamined with so much care by Sir Charles Lyell; uponwhose high authority I shall take it for granted, that theEngis skull belonged to a contemporary of the Mammoth{Elephas primigenius) and of the woolly Rhinoceros {Rhino- 120 cerus tichorhinus), with the bones of which it was found asso-ciated; and that the Neanderthal skull is of great, thoughuncertain, antiquity. Whatever be the geological age of thelatter skull, I conceive it is qui
. Evidence as to man's place in nature . thevalley of the Meuse, in Belgium, and of the Neanderthalnear Diisseldorf, the geological relations of which have beenexamined with so much care by Sir Charles Lyell; uponwhose high authority I shall take it for granted, that theEngis skull belonged to a contemporary of the Mammoth{Elephas primigenius) and of the woolly Rhinoceros {Rhino- 120 cerus tichorhinus), with the bones of which it was found asso-ciated; and that the Neanderthal skull is of great, thoughuncertain, antiquity. Whatever be the geological age of thelatter skull, I conceive it is quite safe (on the ordinary princi-ples of paleontological reasoning) to assume that the formertakes us to, at least, the further side of the vague biologicallimit, which separates the present geological epoch from thatwhich immediately preceded it. And there can be nodoubt that the physical geography of Europe has changedwonderfully, since the bones of Men and Mammoths, Hysenasand Rhinoceroses were washed pell-mell into the cave Fig. 23.—The skull from the cave of Engis—viewed from the right side. Onehalf the size of natm-e. a glabella, b occipital protuberance, (a to bglabello-occipital line), c auditory foramen. The skull from the cave of Engis was originally disco-vered by Professor Schmerling, and was described by him, 121 together with other human remains disinterred at the sametime, in his valuable work, Recherches sur les ossemensfossiles decouverts dans les cavernes de la Province deLiege, published in 1833, (p. 59, et seq.) from which thefollowing paragraphs are extracted, the precise expressionsof the author being, as far as possible, preserved. In the first place, I must remark that these humanremains, which are in my possession, are characterized, likethe thousands of bones which I have lately been disinterr-ing, by the extent of the decomposition which they have under-gone, which is precisely the same as that of the extinctspecies : all, with a few exce
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