28 PAPERS, ETC. 



tockshcad; and the collection of boncs from the Mendip 

 caverns; — what are they to the scientific observer? Mere 

 pieces of tiinber, or fraginents of bone? No. Science en- 

 dows them witb a living spirit ; and under their guidance 

 we enter upon the regions of the unknown world. They 

 bid the darkness of past ages disperse, and reveal to us the 

 haunts, in our immediate neighbourhood, of those animals 

 which are now the denizens only of tropical climes. 



It may seem sheer fancy, the soarings of unbridled im- 

 agination, confidently to assert as I now do, that the 

 bear, the tiger, and the hyama, have had their lair in the 

 thickets around the Mendip and the Quantock Hills ; that 

 the elephant has trampled down under Ins huge feet the 

 trees of a tropical forest in the dells of Somersctshire ; and 

 that the rhinoceros was wont to bathe its unwieldly form 

 in the waters of our own river Tone. Yet, I feel assured 

 that, when you have had laid before you the evidence 

 which leads to this conclusion, you will readily admit that 

 it is not a fiction, but a fact. The evidence is simply this : 

 Here are the bones of the animals to which I have referred. 

 They were all found in this county ; under circumstances 

 which, (as I shall presently show), most clearly prove that 

 the animals to which they belonged Uvea near to the 

 places in which the bones were found, and some at least 

 were born there. 



These animals do not belong to the earlier geological 

 formations. The state and condition of the bones prove 

 this. If you carefully examine them, you will find that 

 the bones from the Mendip caverns differ materially in 

 character from the fossil bones of the Saurians, for ex- 

 ample. The bones of the Saurians are mineralized ; these 

 are not. The sanie is true of the remains of fossil wood. 

 The timher found under Taunton Gaol has been turned on 



