566 Reports and Proceedings—Duke of Argyll’s Address. 
with their remains. I confess I doubt whether it is usual for 
the great pachyderms to die in the beds of rivers after this fashion, 
and to be carried down so often into swallow-holes. These great 
creatures generally retire to the depths of the forests when they 
sicken, and under ordinary conditions the cases would be rare in 
which they would be entombed in this way. But there are other 
conditions, not ordinary but occasional, under which it is very easily 
conceivable that they should be swept into such openings in the 
rocks; and what are such conditions? Why, simply these—that 
some inundation submerged the haunts of these creatures before they 
had time to escape, and that this inundation was accompanied and 
perhaps partly caused by simultaneous movements of the earth’s 
crust, which opened swallow-holes both more numerous and more 
capacious than those which had existed before. And here it must be 
observed that one important part of this explanation is not theory but 
unquestionable fact. It is certain that these caves and fissures so 
packed with carcases are now almost universally dissociated and 
broken off from the old Imes of drainage in which they discharged 
the function of river channels. It is certain, therefore, that the old 
surfaces of country in which they occupied this position have been 
totally destroyed; and this destruction can only have been due to 
great fractures and great bendings of the underlying rocks. At what 
period did these great changes take place? Is it certain that it has 
always been long subsequent to the entombment of the remains ? 
May it not have been to some extent contemporaneous? May not the 
breaking-up of the old surfaces, by subsidences or otherwise, have 
been part of the process which caused the inundations? And may not 
the rush of waters have been determined in their direction by the 
opening of new channels or the enlargement of old ones? Let any 
man go even to the cave of Brixham, which overhangs the beautiful 
spot in Torbay where William III. landed to accomplish the English 
Revolution, and he will see at a glance that since that cave can have 
been the bed of a stream—as beyond all question it was very lately 
in geological time—the whole physical geography of that part of the 
earth’s surface must have been entirely broken up and changed. 
Precisely the same proof, although im many cases even more striking, 
applies to the wonderful bone caves of the shores of the Mediterranean. 
Nothing, I think, but the bondage of a theory which is not founded 
on any sound philosophy could banish from our consideration the high 
probability of one simple explanation, which is this, that in very 
recent times great changes in the moulding of the earth’s surface 
over a great part of Europe occurred with sufficient rapidity to cause 
great destruction of animal life, and during the progress of a wide 
submergence to sweep the bodies of the drowned creatures into 
fissures and swallow-holes which were opened or enlarged at the time. 
There is a curious question which arises out of these bone-caverns and 
bone-fissures. The Uniformitarian theory assumes that there has never 
been anything new under the sun; that in every age there has been 
the same round of mechanical repetition, each age simply repeating 
the phenomena of the ages that went before. Well, let us apply this 
doctrine as far as it is presumably true, and let us look at the result. 
