104 ORGANIC REMAINS PRESERVED. 



except the few bones that may have been collected in caves, 

 or buiied under land slips, or the products of volcanic erup- 

 tions, or in sand drifted by the winds,* it is only in strata 

 formed by water that any remains of land animals can have 

 been preserved. 



We continually see the carcasses of such animals drifted 

 by rivers in their seasons of flood, into lakes, estuaries, and 

 seas; and although it may at first seem strange to find ter- 

 restrial remains, imbedded in strata formed at the bottom of 

 the water, the difficulty vanishes on recollection that the 

 materials of stratified rocks are derived in great part from 

 the Detritus of more ancient lands. As the forces of rains, 

 torrents, and inundations have conveyed this detritus into 

 lakes, estuaries, and seas, it is probable that many carcasses 

 of terrestrial and amphibious animals, should also have been 

 drifted to great distances by currents which swept such 



* Captain Lyon states, that in the deserts of Africa, the bodies of camels 

 are often dessiccated by the heat and dryness of the atmospliere, and become 

 the nucleus of a sandhill, which tlie wind accumulates around them. Be- 

 neath this sand they remain interred like the stumps of palm trees, and the 

 building's cf ancient Eg-ypt. 



In a recent paper on tlie g'eology of the Bermudas (Proceedings of Geol. 

 Soc. Lond. Ap. 9, 1834,) Lieutenant Nelson describes these islands as com- 

 posed of calcareous s;uid and limestone, derived from comminuted siielb 

 and corals;. he considers greut part of the materials of these strata to have 

 been drifted up from the shore by tlie action of the wind. Tlie surface in 

 many parts is composed of loose sand, disposed in all the irregular forms of 

 drifted snow, and presents a surface covered with undulations like those 

 produced by the ripple of water upon sand on the sea-sliore. Recent sliells 

 occur both in the loose sand and solid limestone, and also roots of the Pal- 

 metto now growing in the island. The N. W. coast of Cornwall affords ex- 

 amples of similar invasions of many thousand acres of land by Deluges of 

 »and drifted from the sea-shore, at the villages of Bude and Perran Zabulo; 

 the latter village has been twice destroyed, and buried under sand, drifted 

 inland during extraordinary tempests, at distant intervals of time. See 

 Trans, of Geol. Soc. of Cornwall, vol. ii. p. 140, and vol. iii. p. 12. See also 

 De la Beche's Geological Manual, 3d edit. p. 84, and Jameson's Translation 

 of Cuvier's Theory of the earlh, 5lh edit. Note G. 



