The famous cavern of Bruniquel, explored by the Vicomte de Lastic in 1863-4,[168] and described by Professor Owen, is also one of the class which has furnished human bones, along with the remains of the extinct mammalia. It penetrates a cliff in the Jurassic limestone, opposite the little village of Bruniquel (Tarn and Garonne), about forty feet above the level of the river Aveyron. The bottom was covered with a sheet of stalagmite, resting on earth and blocks of stone, for the most part finely cemented into a breccia, that is black with the particles of carbon constituting the “limon noir” of the workmen, four or five feet thick, beneath which is the “limon rouge,” or red earth without charcoal, from three to four feet thick. Every part of the breccia is charged with the broken remains of the wolf, rhinoceros, horse, reindeer, stag, Irish elk and bison, and palæolithic implements of flint and bone; some of the latter having well-executed designs of the heads of horses and reindeer, which prove that the cave had been used as a place of habitation by the hunters of those animals. Imbedded in the breccia at a depth of from three to five feet human bones were met with, and in two recesses several individuals, including a child, were found, one of which Professor Owen and the Vicomte de Lastic disinterred with sufficient care to prove that the body had been buried in the crouching posture. The only calvarium sufficiently perfect to allow of a comparison belonged to the dolicho-cephalic type, and was very fairly developed. Professor Owen infers, from the intimate association of the human bones with the palæolithic implements and mammalia, that the cave of Bruniquel was used as a burial-place by the same people who had used it for habitation, and advances, in support of this, that the bones of man and of the animals are exactly in the same state of preservation, having lost the same amount of gelatine. The evidence, however, does not seem to be altogether conclusive. If the interment had been made after the palæolithic inhabitants had forsaken the cave, the association of the human bones with the refuse bones in their old refuse-heap must inevitably have taken place. And if, further, water charged with carbonate of lime percolated the mass, it would be converted into a hard breccia, and ultimately covered with a sheet of stalagmite. This calcification may have taken place in modern times. A modern bone, as Mr. Evans has observed in the case of Aurignac, may lose its gelatine in a comparatively short time, and become chemically identical with those which have been imbedded in the same matrix for long ages. The mineral condition, therefore, is an uncertain test of relative antiquity.