W. Boyd Dawkins
Published: 2015-07-10
Total Pages: 480
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Excerpt from Cave Hunting: Researches on the Evidence of Caves Respecting the Early Inhabitants of Europe The exploration of caves is rapidly becoming an important field of inquiry, and their contributions to our knowledge of the early history of the sojourn of men in Europe are daily increasing in value and in number. Since the year 1823, when Dr. Buckland published his famous work, the "Reliquiae Diluvianae," no attempt has been made to correlate, and bring into the compass of one work, the crude mass of facts which have been recorded in nearly every country in Europe. In this volume I have attempted to bring the history of cave-exploration down to the knowledge of to-day, and to put its main conclusions before my readers in one connected and continuous narrative. Since Dr. Buckland wrote, the momentous discovery of human relics along with the extinct animals in caves and river deposits has revolutionised the current ideas as to the antiquity and condition of man; and works of art of a high order, showing a familiarity with nature and an aptitude for the delineation of the forms of animals by no means despicable, have been discovered in the caves of Britain, France, Belgium, and Switzerland, that were the dwellings of the primeval European hunters of reindeer and mammoths. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."