of the Mineral and Mosaical Geologies. 313 



mass, as the nidus of the shell was unquestionably moulded upon 

 its surface ; and that the orifices and channels in the rock, which 

 communicate with those internal cavities, were produced by one, 

 or other, or all, of the causes which have been described." 



The phenomena of the cave at Kirkdale, (which are too well 

 known to our readers to require that we should detail them in this 

 place,) appear to have been produced by such operations on the 

 large scale, but very different are the deductions which the elo- 

 quent professor of mineralogy (as Mr. Penn justly styles the au- 

 thor of the ReliqicicE Diluviana) has drawn from them. Accord- 

 ing to the hypothesis which he has framed to account for the phe- 

 nomena, (which, at the outset, he observes, " seem calculated to 

 throw an important light on the state of our planet at a period 

 antecedent to the last great convulsion which has affected its sur- 

 face," and " that they afford one of the most satisfactory chains 

 of consistent circumstantial evidence that he has ever met with in 

 the course of his geological investigation;") the limestone existed 

 in its present consolidated state, and with its present cavity, at the 

 time when the animals, whose exuviae were found there, were 

 lodged within it — and from the disproportion between the dimen- 

 sions of the orifice of the cave, and the natural bulk of the larger 

 animals, (elephant and rhinoceros,) he infers that they must have 

 been introduced by the exertion of some of the smaller, viz., the 

 hyamas, either by individual industry, or " acting conjointly with 

 others, piece-meal and by fragments, into the small recesses in 

 which they are found." " The more rational idea," (more rational 

 than the fanciful causes hitherto assigned to similar animal pli3- 

 nomena) " that the fossil exuvice were drifted northwards by the 

 diluvial waters from tropical regions," says Mr. Buckland, " must 

 be abandoned on the authority afforded by the den at Kirkdale ; 

 and it now remains only to admit, that the animals must have in- 

 habited the countries in which their bones are found *." The cave 

 in question he therefore considers to have been the habitation, dur- 

 ing a long succession of years, of a colony of hyeenas, who 

 dragged into its recesses the other animal bodies, " whose remains 

 are found mixed indiscriminately with their own;" the probability 

 of which idea he contends is supported by the comminuted state 

 and apparently gnawed condition of the bones, and he adds, " this 

 conjecture is rendered almost certain by the discovery I made of 

 many small balls, of the solid calcareous excrement of an animal 

 that had fed on bones, resembling the substance known in the old 

 Materia Meclica, by the name of album grcecumt," and which the 

 keeper of the menagerie at Exeter Change, immediately recognised, 

 as resembling, in form and appearance, the fasces of the Cape 

 hyaena. " I do not know," continues the Professor, " what more 

 conclusive evidence than this can be added to the facts already 



* Reliquice DiliHiancc, p. 173. t Ibid-, y. 20.' 



