"I saw at Liége the collection of Dr. Schmerling, who in three years has, by his own exertion and the incessant labours of a clever amateur servant, cleared out some twenty caves untouched by any previous searcher, and has filled a truly splendid museum. He numbers already thrice the number of fossil cavern mammalia known when Buckland wrote his 'Idola Specus'; and such is the prodigious number of the individuals of some species--the bears, for example, of which he has five species, one large, one new--that several entire skeletons will be constructed. Oh, that the Lewes chalk had been cavernous! And he has these, and a number of yet unexplored and shortly to be investigated holes, all to himself: but envy him not--you cannot imagine what he feels at being far from a metropolis which can afford him sympathy; and having not one congenial soul at Liége, and none who take any interest in his discoveries save the priests--and what kind _they_ take you may guess, more especially as he has found human remains in breccia, embedded with the extinct species, under circumstances far more difficult to get over than any I have previously heard of. The _three_ coats or layers of stalagmite cited by me at Choquier are quite true."[67] Very probably among these human relics was one which was destined to become famous--the skull found in the cave at Engis--for this was described by Dr. Schmerling in his "Recherches sur les ossements fossiles découverts dans les cavernes de la Province de Liége," a book published in 1833. It was found at a depth of nearly five feet, hidden under an osseous breccia, composed of the remains of small animals, and containing one rhinoceros tusk with several teeth of horses and of ruminants. The earth in which it was lying did not show the slightest trace of disturbance, and teeth of rhinoceros, horse, hyæna, and bear surrounded it on all sides.[68] This relic proved--and since then numbers of similar cases have been discovered--that if the man of Engis were an antediluvian, and his corpse had been washed into the cave together with the drowned bodies of rhinoceros, and other animals,[69] that event, at any rate, must have corresponded with a great change in the habits of the larger mammalia, for they had been unable to return to haunts which once had been congenial. In other words, the foundation was being laid, now in 1833, for the next great advance in geological science, the contemporaneity of man and several extinct species of mammals, indicating, of course, the antiquity of the human race. To this point, however, public attention was not directed for nearly twenty years. Then various causes, especially an examination into the evidence discovered in the neighbourhood of Abbeville and Amiens by M. Boucher de Perthes, brought the question to the front. But though the