344 Analysis of Scientific Books. 



With respect to the apertures themselves, whether fissures or 

 caverns, they appear to have been without mud or pebbles when 

 the animals lived and died, whose remains are now found in 

 them. In regard to the present mouths of these dens, our author 

 adduces evidence to show, that they did not exist formerly as 

 at present, but that they are rather truncated portions of the 

 lower regions of the original caverns, laid open as it would seem 

 by the diluvial waters which excavated the valleys in whose 

 cliffs they stand, and which also drifted into these the mud and 

 pebbles. The diluvial matter itself Mr. Buckland describes as either 

 amass of pebbles, or of loam, or sand, with bones indiscriminately 

 distributed through them, and sometimes cemented into an osseous 

 breccia by stalagmitic infiltrations ; in short, there is a complete 

 analogy between the caves of Germany and of England, not merely 

 in respect to their earthy and osseous deposits, but in the species 

 of the animals whose remains are enveloped in them. 



The osseous breccia of Gibraltar, Nice, Dalmatia, ^c, comes 

 next under our author's observation, and is ascribed to the 

 same antediluvian period, with the exception of certain more 

 recent deposits, of which some of our English caves and fissures 

 also furnish instances, and which are ascribed to animals that 

 have more lately fallen into them : when, however, the mouths 

 of the fissures are closed, no such recent reliquiae occur, and all 

 is of a more ancient date. 



The subject of human fossil remains is one of peculiar interest 

 to the geologist, and particularly so in relation to the destruction 

 of the human race by the deluge. But no human remains have 

 yet been found associated with any of the unequivocal ante- 

 diluvian inhabitants of the earth. Human bones, and even urns 

 have been discovered in the caves of Gailenreuth and Zahnloch. 

 In England, too, many human skeletons have been found in 

 caverns, but always attended by circumstances which announce 

 them of postdiluvian origin. Our author examined the remains 

 of human bodies in the cave of Wokey Hole near Wells, and 

 the following are his remarks upon them : 



They have been broken by repeated digging to small pieces ; but the 

 presence of numerous teeth establishes the fact that they are human. 

 These teeth and fragments are dispersed through reddish mud and clay, 

 and some of them united with it by stalagmite into a firm osseous breccia. 

 Among the loose bones 1 found a small piece of a coarse sepulchral urn. 

 The spot on which they lie is within reach of the highest floods of the 

 adjacent river ; and the mud in which they are buried is evidently fluvia- 

 tile, and not diluvjan ; so also is great part, if not the whole, of the 

 mud and sand in tlie adjacent large caverns, the bottoms of all vrhich are 

 filled with water to the height of many feet, by occasional land-floods, 

 which must long ago have undermined and removed any diluvial deposits 

 that may have originally been left in them. I could find no pebbles, nor 

 traces of any other than the human bones, on the single spot 1 have just 

 described ; these are very old, but not antediluvian. In another cave on 

 this same flank of ihe Mendips, at Compton Bishop, near Axbridge, 

 Mr. Peter Fry, of Axbridge, discovered, in the year 1820, a number of 

 bones of foxes, all lying together in the same spot, and brought away 

 fifteen skulls. These, also. Tike the remains of foxes in Buncombe Park 

 andnearPaWland, are of postdiluvian origin, and were probably derived 



