CAUSE FOE TSE ORIQIN OP THE TEADITION OF THE FLOOD. 275 



generally cemented by calcite. The bones are mostly broken 

 and splintered into innumerable sharp fragments, and 

 evidently are not those of animals devoured hy beasts of prey ; 

 nor have they been broJi.en by man. It is not possible to 

 suppose that animals of such different natures, and of such 

 different habitats, could in life ever have herded together. 

 Difficult as the alternative is, I see no other explanation of 

 the phenomena than that of a wide-spread temporary sub- 

 mergence, accompanied by strong earth tremors. In such a 

 case it is easy to conceive that as the waters gradually 

 advanced over the low lands, the animals of the plains would 

 naturally seek safety on the higher grounds and hills. Fly- 

 ing in terror, and cowed by the common danger, the 

 Kuminants and other Herbivores, together Avith the Carni- 

 vores, would, as in the case of the flooding of large deltas 

 in our days, alike seek refuge on the same safety spot. 

 Where that spot was an isolated hill, they would, if it were 

 not out of reach of the flood waters, eventually suffer the 

 same fate. Subsequently the detached limbs and bones, 

 carried, as the land rose again, together with the surface 

 debris, by the effluent currents into the open fissures, were 

 subjected to the clashing of the rubble and the fall of large 

 fragments of rock from the sides of the fissures — whence the 

 reason of their having been so generally crushed and broken. 

 An early French geologist — an able and acute observer — 

 after noting the presence of land shells and bones in a state of 

 disorder in the Ossiferous Fissures of Nice was led incidentally 

 to remark that they seemed as if thrown in by an angry sea 

 invading the land. 



Gibraltar,* The Atlantic waves have left few traces of 

 Raised Beaches and '' head " on the Western Coasts of Spain 

 and Portugal, but on the Rock of Gibraltar there are traces 

 of several such beaches, covered in places by local angular 

 rubble (or head). This rubble extends over the lower slopes 

 of the Rock on both sides. On the Western side it is pro- 

 jected 550 yards seaward at an angle of 8° to 9° (sometimes 

 even less) and attains a thickness of 100 feet. It is clearly 

 not a talus, nor is it a cone of dejection. Its origin has been 

 i-eferred to two periods of severe cold and snow slides. The 



* Sir A. Ramsay and Prof. Ja.s. Geikie, Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, 

 vol. .xxxiv, p. 505. G. Busk, Trans. Zool. Soc. vol. x, pt. 2. 



