220 Royal Society. 
taining analogous deposits of the bones of two extinct species of 
bear, and the same extinct species of hyzna that occurs at Kirk- 
dale. 
In the German caves, the bones are in nearly the same state 
of preservation as in the English, and are not in entire skeletons, 
‘but dispersed as in a charnel house. They are scattered all over 
the caves, sometimes loose, sometimes adhering together by 
stalagmite, and forming beds of many feet in thickness. They 
are of all parts of the body, and of animals of all ages; but are 
never rolled. With them is found a quantity of black earth de- 
rived from the decay of animal flesh; and also in the newly dis- 
covered caverns, we find descriptions of a bed of mud. The 
latter is probably the same diluvial sediment which we find at 
Kirkdale. The unbroken condition of the bones, and presence 
of black animal earth, are consistent with the habit of bears, as 
being rather addicted to vegetable than animal food, and in this 
case, not devouring the dead individuals of their own species. In 
the hyzna’s cave, on the other hand, where both flesh and bones 
were devoured, we have no black earth; but instead of it we 
find in the album grecum, evidence of the fate that has attended 
the carcases and lost portions of the bones whose fragments still 
remain. 
Three-fourths of the total number of bones in the German 
eaves belong to two extinct species of bear, and two-thirds of 
the remainder to the extinct hyena of Kirkdale. There are also 
hones of an animal of the cat kind (resembling the jaguar or 
spotted panther of South America) and of the wolf, fox, and 
polecat, and rarely of elephant and rhinoceros*. 
The bears and hyzna of all these caverns, as well as the ele- 
phant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus, belong to the same extinct 
species that occur also fossil in the diluvian gravel, whence it 
follows ‘that the period in which they inhabited these regions 
was that immediately preceding the formation of this gravel by 
that transient and universal inundation which has left traces of 
its ravages committed at no very distant period over the surface 
of the whole globle, and since which, no important or general 
physical changes appear to have affected it. A 
Both in the case of the English and German eaverns, the 
bones under consideration are never included in the solid rock ; 
they occur in cavities of limestone rocks of various ages and 
formations, but have no further connexion with the rocks them- 
* M. Rosenmuller shows that the bears not only lived and died, but 
were also born, in the same caverns in which their bones have been thus 
accumulated, and the same conclusion follows from the facts observed in 
the cave in Yorkshire. 
selves, 
