326 +Notice and Review of the Reliquiae Diluvianae. 
These conclusions, resulting as they do from legitimate 
premises, put to flight a host of hypotheses, erected on the 
assumption that the sea and land changed places at the 
deluge. Mr. Penn’s airy castle which was erect -« to bat- 
ter down the whole fortress of geology, and which we 
noticed in the commencement of our remarks, is absolutely 
blown ni tenues aurus by this one paragraph of Mr. Buck- 
land. There was no alternative for him, bot cither te 
acknowledge this to be the case, or to attack Mr. Buck- 
land in bis strong entrenchments. He has taken the latter 
course, and endeavored to prove in a ‘‘ Supplement to the 
Comparative Estimate,” ‘‘ that the contents of the caves 
at Kirkdale, and other places, were of contemporaneous 
deposition with the rocks in which they occur, and the 
caverns themselves produced by the gases evolved, during 
the putrefaction of the animal bodies, within the substance 
of the strata, while ina state of soft:ess !! How any per- 
son, who had either seen a cave, or read Mr. Buckland’s 
book,’’ adds the Edinburgh reviewer, ‘ could form such 
an hypothesis, we are utterly at a loss to conceive.” 
The second proof of diluvial action adduced by Mr. 
Buckland, is the beds of diluvium spread over almost ev- 
ery part of the earth, and containing the bones of animals. 
But here a difficulty meets us on the very threshold of 
this argument. Authors almost universally have made no 
distinction between alluvium and diluvium: indeed, they 
have described as alluvium, nearly all the unconsolidated 
strata. It is only when geologists happen to be very par- 
ticular in their descriptions of the newer deposites, that we 
are able to ascertain when they describe alluvium, when di- 
Juvium, and when the unconsolidated tertiary formations. 
We believe the best geologists of the day agree in limiting 
the term alluvial to those deposites which result from causes 
now in action, and ‘‘to appropriate the term diluvium to 
those universal deposits of gravel and loam, to the produc- 
tion of which no cause at present is adequate, and which 
can only be referred to the waters of a sudden and tran- 
sient deluge.”’ This gravel and loam are always confusedly 
mixed together, and are thus distinguished from the older 
deposites of sand and gravel which occur in regular alterna- 
ting beds. The ablest writers in Europe now adopt these 
distinctions, and would no more think of confounding them 
