ON CAVES. 93 
porous mass; and inside the caves there is a difference in 
the quantity of water that trickles over different parts, a 
difference in the amount of carbonate of lime in solution in 
the water, and a difference in the rate of evaporation and 
giving-off of the acid gas. 
Most of the leading facts with regard to caves and cave- 
deposits were noticed by Dr. Buckland, and clearly told in his 
interesting book, the Reliquwice Diluviane. We must remember, 
of course, that he wrote that work to support a theory, and 
so, when he gets to the description of the gravels, &c., 
associated with the cave-deposits, either in or near the caverns, 
he sees in them the evidence of a short and transient, but 
universal, flood. But he quite realised the long sojourn of 
the beasts of prey in the caves, and the many generations of 
animals that furnished them with food. He says that he had 
estimated that in some of the German caverns the bones 
found indicated ten times the number of individuals that 
could in the flesh have been crammed into the cave. He 
spared no pains in gathering information as to the habits of 
the modern representatives of the hyzna and other animals 
whose remains occur in the deposits ; and his graphic descrip- 
tion leaves little to be added. It is interesting to read his inge- 
nious inquiries into the cause of the polished and worn bones 
which are found in these old hyzena-dens, which he refers to the 
trampling of the animals on the fragments as they lay partly 
imbedded in the muddy floor; pointing out, by way of illus- 
tration, how some objects of reverence, in stone or metal, 
have been rubbed down by the touch of devotees. He 
probably had in his mind the toe of the bronze statue of 
St. Peter in Rome, which has been polished and worn by the 
lips of the faithful. 
Buckland’s view, that the deposits of the celebrated Kirk~ 
dale Cave, and other similar caves which he refers to, would 
be connected with a great submergence, which he identified 
with Noah’s Flood, was not, however, so wild as we are some- 
times inclined to think, in our eagerness to assert the inde- 
pendence of such inquiries from all preconceived ideas or 
theological tenets. There certainly is evidence in many places 
along our coasts of small depressions since the occupation of 
those districts by man, and it is extremely probable that the 
land had not, at any rate, recovered its present elevation in this 
country after the greater submergence that followed on the 
Glacial age, before man appeared on the scene. 
There is a great deal of evidence of torrent-action in these 
caves. ‘There are marine shells washed into them and buried 
in the same earth as Paleolithic man and the extinct 
