_Germany._--The rest of this chapter must be devoted to an outline of the history of cave-exploration during the last two centuries. The dread of the supernatural, which preserved the European caves from disturbance, was destroyed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the search after “ebur fossile,” or unicorn’s horn, which ranked high in the materia medica of those days as a specific for many diseases, and which was obtained, in great abundance, in the caverns of the Hartz, and in those of Hungary and Franconia. As the true nature of the drug gradually revealed itself, the German caves became famous for the remains of the lions, hyænas, fossil elephants, and other strange animals, which had been used for medicine. We owe the first philosophical discussion on the point to Dr. Gesner,[4] who, although he maintained that the fossil unicorn consisted, in some cases, of elephant’s teeth and tusks, and in others of its fossil bones, did not altogether give up the idea of its medicinal value. It is a singular fact, that fossil remains of a similar kind are, at the present time, used by the Chinese for the same purpose, and sold in their druggists’ shops.[5] The cave which was most famous at the end of the seventeenth century was that of Bauman’s Hole, in the Hartz, in the district of Blankenbourg. It is noticed in the Philosophical Transactions for the year 1662, and was subsequently described by Dr. Behrens,[6] Leibnitz, De Luc, and Cuvier, along with others in the neighbourhood. Those of Hungary come next in point of discovery, the first notice of them being due to Patterson Hayne in 1672. They penetrate the southern slopes of the Carpathian ranges, and are known by the name of dragons’ caves, because the bones which they contain had been considered from time immemorial to belong to those animals by the country people. These remains were identified by Baron Cuvier as belonging to the cave-bear.[7]