1824.] Animal Remains found in Caves. 199 



Clift might startle at this difficulty one would think. But as 

 this is a subject on which so few are competent to decide, and 

 so much has been advanced on the continent by supposed infal- 

 lible judges, that we must be silent on that head; only it does 

 seem strange, that if some are so evidently gnawed, more are 

 not so ; and I do not find one in that supposed state among the 

 immense mass that Mr. Cottle has collected from Oreston ; and 

 as some one must have been left if this was their den of slaugh- 

 ter, why have not their skulls been found — at any rate that of the 

 last survivor? Stress has been laid on these bones not having been 

 rolled, but I think that could not have been, or pebbles found 

 with them, in the places where they are found ; for if granite 

 rocks have been proved to have been removed by water hundreds 

 of miles, surely bones floating in masses might have been con- 

 ducted by currents from very distant parts from those where we 

 find them, and being lighter they would not have mixed with 

 gravel or beach stones at the retreat of the waters, but probably 

 washed up with mud, and entangled in each other, they fell into 

 these cavities on the retreat of the waters, or were carried in by 

 whirlpools, so as, after receiving many fractures, to be deposited 

 at length in a level bed such as they were discovered in, resting 

 on the original stalagmite, and when all was dry, receiving in the 

 course of ages an additional covering of a similar deposition. 

 This conjecture accounts also for their intermixture, as well as 

 fractured state ; for rolled bone, and wood, or ivory, are only 

 invariably found among ancient beaches of gravel such as now 

 lies below the land at Shorehampton, near Bristol, and which 

 has produced many specimens whenever the mine is opened to 

 gravel Lord de Clifford's park there, a deposit undoubtedly left 

 there on the borders of the Severn channel at the retreat of the 

 waters of the flood. 



To come at the truth will be difficult, and therefore we are 

 obliged to Prof. Bnckland for the great pains he has taken in 

 bringing forward all that has hitherto been known On a subject 

 that seems so strongly to corroborate the Scripture history of the 

 Deluge ; but we must not in the history of natural events look 

 to any authority but that which is founded on circumstances 

 applicable to the event under discussion. 



Yours, &c. G.Cumberland. 



