1822.] Bones discovered in a Cave at Kirkdale, in Yorkshire. 135 
are identical with those of the Heddington quarries near Oxford, 
but its substance is harder and more compact, and more inter- 
spersed with siliceous matter, forming irregular concretions, beds, 
and nodules of chert in the limestone, and sometimes entirely 
penetrating its coralline remains. The most compact beds of 
this limestone resemble the younger alpine limestone of Meillie- 
tie and Aigle, in Switzerland, and they alternate with, and pass 
gradually into, those of a coarser oolitic texture ; and both varie- 
ties are stratified in beds from one to four feet thick. The cave 
is situated in one of the compact beds which lies between two 
others of the coarser oolitic variety; the latter vary in colour 
from light-yellow to blue; the compact beds are of a dark grey 
passing to black, are extremely fetid, and full of corals and 
spines of the echinus cidaris. The compact portions of this 
oolite partake of the property common to compact limestones of 
all ages and formations, of being perforated by irregular holes 
and caverns intersecting them in all directions ; the cause of 
these cavities has never been satisfactorily ascertained : into this 
uestion (which is one of considerable difficulty in geology) it is 
oreign to my present purpose to inquire any further than to 
state that they were neither produced, enlarged, or diminished 
by the presence of the animals whose bones we now find in 
them. 
The abundance of such caverns in the limestone of the vici- 
nity of Kirkdale is evident from the fact of the engulphment of 
several of the rivers above enumerated in the course of their 
passage across it from the eastern moorlands to the vale of Pick- 
ering ; and it is important to observe that the elevation of the 
Kirkdale cave, above the bed of the Hodge Beck, exceeding 100 
feet, excludes the possibility of our attributing the muddy sedi- 
ment we shall find it to contain, to any land flood or extraordi- 
nary rise of the waters of that or any other now existing river. 
It was not till the summer of 1821 that the existence of any 
animal remains, or of the cavern containing them, had been sus- 
pected. At this time, in continuing the operations of a large 
quarry along the brow of the slope justmentioned (Pl. XIV. fig. 1), 
the workmen accidentally intersected the mouth of a long hole 
or cavern, closed externally with rubbish, and overgrown with 
grass and bushes. As this rubbish was removed before any 
competent person had examined it, it is not certain whether it 
was composed of diluvial gravel and rolled pebbles, or was sim- 
ply the debris that had fallen from the softer portions of the 
strata that lay above it; the workmen, however, who removed 
it, and some gentlemen who sawit, assured me, that it was com- 
posed of gravel and sand. In the interior of the cave there was 
not a single rolled pebble, nor one bone, or fragment of bone, 
that bears the slightest mark of having been rolled by the action 
of water. A few bits of limestone and roundish concretions of 
