In the winter of 1908-09 a very interesting discovery was announced in the daily newspapers—the discovery of a human skull and some bones buried in a cave called the Grotto of the Chapelle-aux-Saints, in the central department of France, known as the Corrèze, not very far from Perigueux, in the Dordogne. An account was given of this discovery by Professor Marcelin Boule, of the Paris Museum, to the Académie des Sciences, and the description of the bones, which had been carefully pieced together, and were exhibited to the meeting of the Academy, was sent by him to me (see Fig. 65). Some exaggerated statements as to the monkey-like character of the race to which these bones belonged (exaggerated, but not altogether devoid of truth) were circulated by imaginative correspondents in the newspapers. It is the fact that these human remains are of enormous antiquity, and belong to a very peculiar and primitive race known as the Neander Men, so called because a skull and some bones of this same race were found fifty years ago in a cave in the Neander valley,[7] near Elberfeld, on the Rhine. The French archæologists, or “prehistorians,” as we now call them—are the leading discoverers in all that relates to very early man. The caves in Central and Southern France (Dordogne, Pyrenees, and Riviera) and the gravels in the north have furnished the most wonderful and interesting evidences of the existence of human beings at an immensely remote period in this part of Europe. Enthusiastic excavators and collectors of French nationality have discovered, preserved, and described the weapons, carvings, and drawings made by the old cave-dwellers of Southern France, buried by the accumulated deposits of ages deep in the caverns where the human artists who made these things used to live. In England only two such caves containing the implements of prehistoric men have been found—whilst a few are known in Belgium, Moravia, and Switzerland.