“There is nothing to evince the action of water; on the contrary, the numerous stones that occur are all angular.... Below these caves a slope of about 180 feet descends to the edge of the sea. Through the upper part of this slope, at distances from the cave of from 0 to ten feet, is a railway cutting 600 feet long, fifty-four feet deep, and sixty feet above the sea. The mass removed in making this cutting was composed of angular stones not waterworn. Loose at the surface, it soon became a more or less mature breccia, for the most part so hard that it was blasted with gunpowder.” In this breccia, and at various depths, some of more than thirty feet, the author has taken out teeth of the bear (_Ursus spelæus_) and of the hyæna (_Hyæna spelæa_) while with and below those teeth he found flints worked by man. The subsequent exploration by M. Rivière[248] has resulted in no important addition to the fauna: the famous human skeleton having been, as I have already remarked in the seventh chapter, interred in the pleistocene strata, and probably not palæolithic. It may possibly be of the era of the upper floors described by Mr. Moggridge, in which all the remains belong to living species.[249] This cave-fauna is more closely related to that of southern Europe than to that north of the Alps and Pyrenees. The striped hyæna found in the cave of Lunel-viel, Hérault, by Marcel de Serres, along with the reindeer and other animals, probably belongs to the same southern group. _Bone-caves of Sicily._ Certain members of the African fauna are also proved to have ranged northwards over Europe in the direction of Sicily, by the discoveries in the caves of that island. The Sicilian bone-caves have been worked for the sake of the bones since the year 1829; and of these many shiploads were sent to Marseilles from San Ciro, belonging, according to M. de Christol, principally to the hippopotamus. In 1859,[250] Dr. Falconer examined the collections made from this cave, as well as those which remained _in situ_, and carried on further researches into a second in the neighbourhood, known as the Grotto di Maccagnone, and in the following year two others were discovered and explored in northern Sicily by Baron Anca. The species were as follows:-- _Homo_, man. _Felis leo_, lion. _Hyæna crocuta_, spotted hyæna. _Ursus ferox_,[251] grizzly bear. _Canis._ _Cervus_, deer. _Bos_, ox. _Equus_, horse. _Sus scrofa_, boar. _Elephas antiquus._ _Elephas Africanus_, African elephant. _Hippopotamus major_, hippopotamus. _Hippopotamus Pentlandi._ _Lepus._ The presence of man was indicated by charcoal and flint flakes.