90 PROFESSOR T. MCKENNY HUGHES, M.A. 
paint of my notices was destroyed in the subterranean water- 
falls and rapids. 
These chasms or funnel-shaped holes are the feeders of the 
caves. They are only vertical caves formed in the horizontal 
surface of the rock. They are known as Swallow-holes, Pot- 
holes, Sink-holes, and in Italy as Dolinas. They have various 
local names, expressing the idea that they are not part of the 
more regular and common operations of nature: the Devil’s 
Chaldron, as in French, Chaldrons du Diable, Marmites 
des Géants, Bétoires, or, more simply named, they are the 
Katabothra of the Greeks. 
They begin sometimes under the covering of drift, and, 
when the opening grows too large, or the covering soil is 
sodden and will not hold its own weight together, the surface 
breaks in. Mr. Haythornthwaite, of Kirkby Lonsdale, told 
me that on a farm of his above Wethercote Cave, after wet 
weather, he once saw one fall in. 
How swallow-holes are formed in chalk has been described 
by Prestwich.* 
The age of the cave-deposits is quite a separate question 
from that of the caves themselves. ‘The formation of the 
‘caves was a time of destruction; but the infilling of the caves 
belonged to a time of accumulation—when there was no great 
scour through the caves, but the rain carried in earth and 
stones, if there was loose drift above, or only muddy water if 
the cave was nearly closed, or perhaps nothing was deposited 
but the fine unctuous clayey residuum of the chemically- 
decomposed limestone itself. Angular fragments disengaged 
by frost or heat formed a barricade about the mouth. 
Bones were washed in or carried there by beasts of prey— 
and man. Bucklandt+ referred most of the caves that he 
explored to hyena-dens. Constant Prevostt thought the 
bones that occurred so thickly in the cave-earth in Franconia 
were all washed in by torrents. This explanation will hold 
oniy in exceptional cases. The bones may have been washed 
from one part to another of a cave, and a few do get washed 
in from above. I have seen three sheep being carried down 
towards a swallow-hole, and have found two drowned rabbits 
and some dead trout on the gravel at the bottom of Hunt 
Pot, on the flanks of Whernside. But we never see the 
ground so covered with bones of various animals that a flood 
7 ONT IGe Sy VOl x. 1804. 9 229, 
+ Reliquie Diluviane. 
t Mem. Soc. @ Hist. Nat. Paris, t. iv. 
