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was once a den of hyaenas, who dragged into its recesses the other 

 animal bodies, whose remains are mixed indiscriminately with their 

 own ; a conjecture, says the author, rendered almost certain, by the 

 discovery of a portion of solid calcareous excrement, recognized by 

 the keeper of the Menagerie at Exeter 'Change, from its resemblance 

 to that of the Cape hyaena ; the analysis, too, of this excrement shows 

 its derivation from bones, as it consists chiefly of phosphate and car- 

 bonate of lime. 



It appears from the researches of M. Cuvier, that the fossil hyaena 

 was nearly one third larger than the largest of the modern species, 

 of the habits of which the author gives an account, with a view of 

 verifying and illustrating his opinion concerning the state and origin 

 of the contents of the Yorkshire cave. Even the abundance of the 

 remains of water rats, he says, is consistent with the omnivorous ap- 

 petite of modern hyaenas. In respect to ruminating animals, as they 

 form the ordinary food of beasts of prey, the quantity of their bones 

 is not surprising ; but the abundant occurrence of some of the other 

 remains, in a cave of the dimensions of that described, is not so ob- 

 vious ; since such animals as the elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopo- 

 tamus, could not possibly have found an entrance, and since it is 

 foreign to the habits of the hyaena to prey on the larger pachyder- 

 mata. As a solution of this difficulty* the author supposes that the 

 remains in question are those of individuals who died a natural death; 

 and though the hyaena would neither have had strength to kill an 

 elephant or rhinoceros, nor to drag home the entire carcase of a dead 

 one, yet he might convey the most bulky animals piecemeal into his 

 den, supposing them to have died in the neighbourhood. From this 

 view of the subject it appears probable that the accumulation of these 

 bones went on during a succession of years, while the animals in 

 question were natives of this country ; and the general dispersion of 

 similar bones through the diluvian gravel of high latitudes, over a 

 great part of the northern hemisphere, shows that the period at 

 which they inhabited these regions was that immediately preceding 

 the formation of this gravel, and that they perished by the waters that 

 produced it. Moreover, as all these animals belong to species now 

 unknown, and as there is no evidence of their ever having existed 

 subsequent to the formation of the diluvium, we may conclude that 

 the period at which the bones were introduced into the Kirkdale cave 

 was antediluvian. That these extinct species never re-established 

 themselves after the deluge, seems proved by the total absence of 

 their remains in the varieties of postdiluvian accumulations of sand, 

 mud, and peat, in which, however, we find the remains of horses, 

 deer, and some other animals. 



The phenomena, then, of this cave seem referable to a period at 

 which the world was inhabited by land animals bearing only a general 

 resemblance to those now existing, before the last inundation of the 

 earth. So completely, however, had the violence of that tremendous 

 convulsion destroyed and remodelled the form of its antediluvian sur- 

 face, that it is only in caverns protected from its ravages that we may 



