The flint implements from Hoxne were found under three different layers or beds. The first, vegetable, a foot and a half in depth. The second was clay, seven and a half feet thick. The third, a bed of sand, with shells one foot in thickness. The fourth layer, containing the implements was a bed of gravel two feet in depth. The number of these flints was so great that they were carried out by the baskets-full, and thrown into the ruts of the adjoining road. On account of the great number, this spot might have been the place where they were manufactured. Their date is not coeval with the bowlder clay, but undoubtedly belong, to the last of this epoch. The human bones found in the loess of the Rhine, near Colmar, were two fossilized fragments of the skull. They were found in undisturbed soil along with the fossil bones of the extinct species of mammoth, horse, gigantic deer, aurochs, and other mammalia. The fragment of the skull "showed a depressed forehead, strongly projecting superciliary arches, and a type, on the whole, approaching the so-called _dolichocephalic_, or long-headed form."[22] These remains date so near the end of the glacial as to almost enter the inter-glacial. CHAPTER III. GLACIAL EPOCH--CONTINUED. _Belgian Caverns._--The relics discovered by Dr. Schmerling, in the caves of Belgium, must be referred to the time of the retreat of the glaciers. The glaciers were still in existence, but their receding had freed immense tracts of land, and the space they now covered was small in proportion to their former extent. Whether it be considered or not, that vegetation greatly nourished and the great wild beasts were rapidly increasing, one thing must be noticed, and that is, floods must have succeeded or followed closely upon the retreat of the ice. Many remains, referred to the glacial epoch, may in reality, have occupied the time of the floods occurring just previous to the commencement of the inter-glacial. The Belgian Caverns, near Liége, either belong exactly to the ice, or else to a period not far removed. Lyell considers the older monuments of the palæolithic period to be the rude implements found in ancient river gravel and in the mud and stalagmite caves.[23] Caves of this description are those reported on by Dr. Schmerling.