In the year 1852, a laborer named Bonnemaison, employed in repairing roads, observed that rabbits, when hotly pursued by the sportsman, ran into a hole which they had burrowed in a talus of small fragments of limestone and earthy matter lodged in a depression on the face of a steep escarpment of nummulitic limestone which forms the bank of a small brook near the town of Auvignac. On reaching as far into the opening as the length of his arm, he drew out to his surprise one of the long bones of the human skeleton; and his curiosity being excited, and having a suspicion that the hole communicated with a subterranean cavity, he commenced digging a trench through the middle of the talus, and in a few hours found himself opposite a heavy slab of rock, placed vertically against the entrance. Having removed this, he discovered on the other side of it an arched cavity, seven or eight feet in its greatest height, ten in width, and seven in horizontal depth. It was almost filled with bones, among which were two entire skulls, which he recognized at once as human. The people of Auvignac flocked in astonishment to the spot, and Dr. Amiel, the mayor, having first ascertained as a medical man and anatomist that the relics contained the bones of seventeen human skeletons of both sexes and all ages, ordered them all to be reinterred in the parish cemetery. In 1860, M. Lartet, a distinguished French savan, examined thoroughly the remaining contents of the cavern and its surroundings and approaches. He found, on removing the talus which filled up the depression on the face of the rock, a level terrace leading to the mouth of the cave. On this terrace was a layer of charcoal and ashes, eight inches thick, containing fragments of broken, burnt, and gnawed bones of _extinct and recent mammalia_, in all some nineteen species, and some seventy or eighty individuals. Also in the same deposit were hearthstones, and works of art, flint knives, projectiles, sling-stones, and chips. Many of the bones of the extinct herbivora were streaked, as if the flesh had been scraped off them by a flint instrument, and others were split open, as if for the purpose of extracting the marrow. Inside the grotto were two or three feet of made earth mixed with human and a few animal bones of extinct and recent species. None of them, however, burnt or gnawed; and numerous small flat plates of a white shelly substance made of some species of cockle, perforated in the middle as if for the purpose of being strung into a bracelet; also some mementos and memorials of the chase and the sepulture. Did no opposing traditions stand in the way, we are quite sure the evidence elicited from this examination would at once fix its character as a burial place, of an antiquity coeval with the existence of the great extinct mammalia of the post-pliocene period. It, however, contains some features of special interest. In the words of Sir Charles Lyell: