ON CAVES. 23 



Also a letter, just received, from Sir Charles Warren, regretting that he is 

 unable to be present, as he had intended. 



Sir WARINGTON W. SMYTH, F.R.S. In response, sir, to your invitation, 

 I have much pleasure in saying that I am sure the paper we have just 

 listened to must have been a great treat to the whole of us. My friend, 

 Mr. McKenny Hughes, the Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge, 

 has had an unusual amount of experience in hunting up and examining 

 caves, and I may state that, having during a series of years had opportunities 

 of exploring several of those he has mentioned, I feel particularly indebted 

 to him for the graphic account he has given us of a district and cave I have 

 not seen. I shall not attempt to follow him into the difficult region into 

 which he has been carried by the wingless grasshoppers of which he has 

 spoken, a part of the question which we may look upon as sepa- 

 rated from the earlier portion of the paper. I desire only to express 

 to him the reasons why I feel especially gratified with some of the 

 points he has put before us in describing the modes by which caves have 

 been formed and the manner in which they have been filled by various kinds 

 of material. I recollect that in my earlier days of geological study I was 

 surprised to find that a former generation of geologists I speak especially 

 of Professors BucklandandSedgwick and their continental contemporaries 

 set very great store by the examination of caverns, and entered not only into 

 a series of explorations, but of philosophic considerations, of a most interest- 

 ing character, on this subject. Indeed, I do not know that anything more 

 interesting can be pointed out than the work by Professor Buckland, of 

 which Professor Hughes has reminded us, Meliquiw Diluviance, although 

 it is, doubtless, true that the theory on which he relied so much at the time he 

 wrote that book is now very much discredited. The descriptions he gave with 

 such admirable freshness of the different caves he visited and the facts he sub- 

 mitted cannot be studied by us without great advantage. I had the happi- 

 ness, when a young man, of making a tour into that part of Franconia in 

 which Dr. Buckland particularly delighted, and of seeing some caves in the 

 neighbourhood of Muggendorf, which he made a special locality ; and the 

 impression formed in my mind coincided with his view as to the filling of 

 the caverns in that part of the world by a succession of cave bears with the 

 bones of animals which they had dragged in, so that in process of time they 

 became a rich harvest to the geologist, who, on taking up the stalagmite 

 which covered the cavern floors, found the bones of those animals embedded 

 in it. I remember being greatly struck with a cave high up the side of the 

 Muggendorf Valley, where it was clear that the hollow had been formed by 

 the action of water containing carbonic acid, and that some of the bones 

 discovered there must have come in by accident from openings above. In 

 fact, the bones of two human beings were found in that cave underneath the 

 chasm through which they had evidently fallen. The same thing has bee n 

 impressed on me most forcibly in the district of Cross Fell, Cumberland, 

 where, having, some few years ago, had occasion to be frequently crossing 



