CHAPTER XII.
General History of Fossil Organic Remains.
As "the variety and formation of God's creatures in the
animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms" are specially
marked out by the founder of this Treatise, as the subjects
from which he desires that proofs should be sought of the
power, wisdom, and goodness of the Creator; I shall enter
at greater length into the Evidences of this kind, afforded
by fossil organic remains, than I might have done, without
such specific directions respecting the source from which my
arguments are to be derived. I know not how I can better
fulfil the object thus proposed, than by attempting to show
that the extinct species of Animals and Vegetables which
very extensive collection of fossil Bones made by M. Schmerling in the caverns of that neighbourhood, and has visited some of the places where they were found. Many of these bones appear to have been brought together like those in the cave of Kikdale, by the agency of Hyænas, and have evidently been gnawed by these animals; others, particularly those of Bears, are not broken, or gnawed, but were probably collected in the same manner as the bones of Bears in the cave of Gailenreuth, by the retreat of these animals into the recesses of caverns on the approach of death; some may have been introduced by the action of water.
The human bones found in these caverns are in a state of less decay than those of the extinct species of beasts; they are accompanied by rude flint knives and other instruments of flint and bone, and are probably derived from uncivilized tribes that inhabited the caves. Some of the human bones may also be the remains of individuals who, in more recent times, may have been buried in such convenient repositories.
M. Schmerling, in his Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles des Cavernes de Liège, expresses his opinion that these human bones are coeval with those of the quadrupeds, extinct species, found with them; an opinion from which the Author, after a careful examination of M. Schmerling's collection, entirely dissents.
