animals characteristic of that remote period. The superficial portions of the cave-earth had certainly been disturbed, and there is no evidence that the disturbance did not extend down to the horizon where the skeleton rested. Nevertheless, Mr. Pengelly concludes that the interment is of palæolithic age from its analogy with that of Cro-Magnon and Paviland, which we have seen to be of equally doubtful antiquity. It seems to me that this conclusion, which is almost universally accepted, is not warranted by the facts, and that it cannot be used in support of any speculation as to the condition of man in the pleistocene age. The skull is described by M. Rivière as long, the thigh-bones are strongly carinate, and the tibiæ are platycnemic as in the case of those from Cro-Magnon, Gibraltar, Sclaigneaux, and North Wales. _Grotta dei Colombi in Island of Palmaria, inhabited by Cannibals._ We are indebted to Professor Capellini for an account of the exploration of the Grotta dei Colombi, a cave in a vertical cliff in the island of Palmaria,[172] overlooking to the south the Gulf of Spezzia. In the red loam, composing the floor, were numerous flakes and scrapers, a rounded “striker” of Saussurite, quartz, pebbles, fragments of pottery, a bone needle, a whistle made of the first phalange of a goat’s foot, shells perforated for suspension, _Natica mille-punctata_, _Pectunculus glycimeris_, and _Patella cærulea_, together with bones of goat, hog, ox, wolf, wild cat, and broken and cut human bones belonging to children and young adults. Among the remains Professor Capellini draws attention in particular to the thigh-bones, scorched by fire, one of which bears incisions on its posterior face made by a flint implement in cutting away the flesh (Pl. 73, _a_), and is also marked by scraping. He considers that they belong to an ape, closely allied to the _Macacus innuus_ of Gibraltar and North Africa, and concludes, therefore, that the animal was living in Palmaria at the time that the cave was inhabited. This identification is forbidden by the spongy texture, the rounded contour, and the absence of epiphyses that imply that the bone was very young, and that in the adult it would be far larger than any thigh-bone of the apes. On comparing his figures with eight femora belonging to young children, from the cairn at Cefn, and the caves at Perthi-Chwareu, I find that they agree in every particular with two, the flattening of the inferior extremity, considered by Prof. Calori to be a non-human character, being equally met with in all, and being relatively greater in the younger than the older. They offer, therefore, unmistakeable proof that the inhabitants of the cave were cannibals (Fig. 73). I am informed by my friend, Prof. Busk, that the bone figured belonged to a child about eight years old. The outline _b_ in the figure represents the contour of one of the femora from the cavern at Cefn, described in the fifth chapter.