172 CAVES AND CAVE DEPOSITS. 
local names, expressing the idea that they are not part of the 
more regular and common operations of nature: the Devil’s 
Chaldron, as in French, Chaldrons du Diable, Marmites des 
Géants, Bétoires, or, more simply named, they are the Katabothra 
of the Greeks. 
They begin sometimes under the covering of drift, and, when 
the opening grows too large, or the covering soil is sodden and 
will not hold its own weight together, the surface breaks in. 
Mr. Haythornthwaite, of Kirby Lonsdale, told me that on a 
farm of his above Wethercote Cave, after wet weather, he once 
saw one fall in. 
The age of the cave-deposits is quite a separate question 
from that of the caves themselves. The formation of the caves 
was a time of destruction; but the infilling of the caves 
belonged to a time of accumulation—when there was no great 
scour through the caves, but the rain carried in earth and stones, 
if there was loose drift above, or only muddy water if the cave 
was nearly closed, or perhaps nothing was deposited but the fine 
unctuous clayey residuum of the chemically-decomposed lime- 
stone itself. Angular fragments disengaged by frost or heat 
formed a barricade about the mouth. Bones were washed in or 
carried there by beasts of prey—and by man. Buckland referred 
most of the caves that he explored to hyena-dens. Constant 
Prevost thought the bones that occurred so thickly in the cave- 
earth in Franconia were all washed in by torrents. ‘This 
explanation will hold only in exceptional cases. The bones 
may have been washed from one part to the other of a cave, 
and a few do get washed in from above. I have seen three 
sheep being carried down towards a swallow-hole, and have 
found two drowned rabbits and some dead trout on the gravel 
at the bottom of Hunt Pot, on the flanks of Whernside. But 
we never see the ground so covered with bones of various 
animals that a flood would wash them into caves and form an 
ossiferous deposit like that in the caves of Franconia. 
There can be, however, no general explanation for all bone- 
bearing caves. We must examine all the evidence in each case, 
and then form our opinion as to how a particular bone-bed was 
formed. Buckland’s views seems to me to be in most cases the 
correct one. 
So are caves formed and modified and filled and swept clean 
and filled again, and we must bear all these facts in mind when 
we attempt to read the story of a cave from the deposits which 
we find in it. 
Broken-up stalagmitic floors are not evidence of the action 
of the sea, but, on the contrary, must generally be referred to 
land floods. 
