III. In spite of the discoveries which were multiplied in caverns and gravel-pits, even in the neighbourhood of Paris, the same objections were brought against the believers in fossil man which Cuvier had opposed to Amy Boué. The juxtaposition of the remains of extinct animals and human bones, or articles of human workmanship, were attributed to a _reformation_ effected by water. The high authority of M. de Bramont lent new force to this argument. He compared the alluvium of the neighbourhood of Abbeville to his _terrains des pentes_, formed, he said, by storms of an exceptional violence, which only happened once in a thousand years, and which heap up together materials derived from different beds. As for the objects discovered in caverns they inspired still less confidence than the others, on account of the ease with which the bed might be undermined by eddies, which would tend to deposit in the heart of a subjacent layer objects derived from the upper layers, without destroying either the one or the other. Many men of high intellect still hesitated, until M. Lartet published his remarkable work upon the grotto of Aurignac (1861). Here doubt was impossible. This grotto, or rather rock-shelter, was closed at the time of its discovery by a slab of stone brought from a distance; M. Lartet discovered, either in the interior or at the entrance, the bones of eight or nine species of animals which are essentially characteristic of quaternary deposits. In his memoir he gives details of all the remains. Some of these animals had evidently been eaten upon the spot, their bones, partly carbonized, still bore the trace of fire, the charcoal and ashes of which were discovered; those of a young tichorhine rhinoceros showed marks made by flint implements, and their spongy extremities had been gnawed by carnivora; the species of the latter was shown by his excrement, which was recognized as that of the _hyena spelæa_. The grotto or rock-shelter of Aurignac is excavated in a small mountainous group, a spur of the plateau of Lanémézan, which the Pyrenean drift has never reached. It is, therefore, free from the objections drawn from the intervention of aqueous currents. Thus the facts made known by M. Lartet were generally accepted at once in their fullest signification. These facts show that man lived in the midst of a quaternary fauna, which he used as food, including the rhinoceros, and was followed by the hyena of this epoch, who finished the remains of his meals. The coexistence of man with these fossil species was proved. A few ill-judged attacks were still made by savants, who did not accept the testimony of these facts, among others that of the discovery of a human jaw made by Boucher de Perthes. But the discoveries became so numerous that the last among them was soon reduced to silence, and had to submit to the mention of _fossil man_ without raising the slightest protest.