OF CARNIVOROUS ANIMALS. 537 



relative proportion is always infinitely less than in the 

 caves ; and it is always sufficiently proved by these cir- 

 cumstances, that these various animals have lived to- 

 gether in the same countries, and have belonged to the 

 same epoch. 



Cuvier concludes, there can only be imagined three ge- 

 neral causes which might have placed these bones in such 

 quantity in these vast subterranean cavities. Either they 

 are the remains of animals which inhabited these abodes, 

 and which died peaceably there ; or inundations and other 

 violent causes have carried them into these cavities ; or, 

 lastly, they had been enveloped in rocky strata, the dis- 

 solution of which produced these caverns, and they have 

 not been dissolved by the agent which carried off the mat- 

 ter of the strata. 



This last cause is refuted by the fact, that the strata 

 in which the caves occur contain no bones ; and the se- 

 cond by the entireness of the smallest prominences of the 

 bones, which does not permit us to think that they had 

 been rolled ; for if some bones are worn, as Mr Buckland 

 has remarked, they are only so on one side, which would 

 only prove that some current has passed over them, and 

 in the deposit in which they are. We are, therefore, ob- 

 liged to have recourse to the first supposition, whatever 

 difficulties it presents on its part, and to say that these 

 caves served as a retreat to carnivorous animals, and that 

 these carried there, for the purpose of devouring them, 

 the animals which formed their prey, or the parts of these 

 animals. 



Mr Buckland has observed, that the hyena bones are 

 not less broken and splintered than those of the herbivo- 

 rous animals ; from which he concludes, that the hyenas 



