Skeleton lately found at the Tilbury Docks, Essex. 145
cave and its surroundings is given in Sir Charles Lyell's
'Antiquity of Man' (3rd ed., p. 76). Lyell remarks that tho
body may possibly have been washed into the cavern from
above—through the fissure communicating with the surface,
which slopes downwards to the cave at an angle averaging
about 45 degrees. But the most simple and probable
explanation of the existence of the skeleton in the cave
seems to be that the man had permanent or temporary
quarters there, and died therein quietly at last. For the
skull and the other bones of the skeleton were found by the
quarrymen working in their neighbourhood to be lying
together in the same horizontal plane; and it is supposed
(according to Lyell) that the skeleton was complete when
found, but that "the workmen, ignorant of its value, scattered
and lost most of the bones, preserving only the larger ones."
And it seems almost impossible that the skeleton would have
heen either perfect or horizontal after a prolonged journey of
weeks or months from the top of the irregular, jagged fissure
to the bottom. It was covered by loam about 5 ft. thick,
which had no doubt been washed down from the surface
through the fissure; but there was no crust of stalagmite
overlying the loam, and no bones of other animals were found
in it. The antiquity of the Neanderthal man is thus marked
only by the deposition of this loam above him. And the
length of time this deposition occupied is a question without
any possibility of even an approximate answer, on account of
the probable variations in the capacity of the fissure, from
time to time, as a channel for loam. There is nothing, how-
ever, to suggest an antiquity greater than, if so great as, that
of the Tilbury man. The words of Dr. Schaaffhausen (trans-
lated by Mr. Busk) on this point are given in Prof. Huxley's
book on 'Man's Place in Nature,' p. 129. He says :—"These
remarkable. human remains belonged to a period antecedent
to the time of the Celts and Germans, and were in all
probability derived from one of the wild races of North-
Western Europe spoken of by Latin writers, and which were
encountered as autochthones by the German immigrants."
It is evident, therefore, that the true importance of both