144 EARLY MAN IN BRITAIN. [CHAP. vi. 



destruction of the land which has taken place in the long 

 lapse of ages, to which attention has already been 

 directed in treating of the Meiocene period. In my 

 opinion there have been ossiferous caverns in all geolo- 

 gical periods, but they and all shelters then accessible 

 to animals, together with the rocks in which they were 

 hollowed, have been carried away so completely that no 

 traces of any caverns of those times have been discovered 

 in any part of the world. The rain, the alternation of 

 heat and cold, the carbonic acid in the atmosphere, the 

 acids evolved from decaying vegetation, and the breakers 

 on the sea-shore, have wrought this wholesale destruction 

 so thoroughly that there are only two caverns that can be 

 said to be even as old as the mid Pleistocene. In one 

 of these, at Oreston near Plymouth, Mr. "Whidbey x / 

 discovered the remains of the big-nosed rhinoceros in ^ 

 the year 1816. The other is at Baume, in the Jura, in 

 which the remains described by Professors Lartet 2 and 

 Gervais were found, belonging to the machairodus, a 

 non-tichorine rhinoceros, to the ox, wild boar, elephant, 

 spotted hysena, and cave bear. In both these the 

 mammalia are identical with those of the mid Pleisto- 

 cene, with the exception of the machairodus, which 

 must, however, have been living at that time, since 

 it occurs in mid and late Pleistocene strata. 



^See Buckland, Reliquiae Diluviance, 4to, p. 67. Busk, Quart. Geol. 

 Soc. Journ., Loud., xxvi. p. 457. 



2 Gervais, Animaux Vertebr^ p. 78, PI. 18. Lartet, Gongr. Int. Prf- 

 hist. ArcheoL, 8vo, Paris, p. 269. 



