INTERGLACIAL EPOCHS. 3 2 9 



of their more fragile and delicate parts. Thus the molar of an 

 elephant, which had been broken in two by a large block of 

 stone, still showed the fragile coronoid process and enamel of the 

 crown uninjured. " Entire skeletons of the dormice were found 

 between blocks, as if their bodies had sunk into the hollows as 

 they floated past, whilst fragments of large birds, bones, and 

 traces of a huge freshwater turtle, and several vertebra and 

 skulls of lizards, as large as a chameleon, were found, in con- 

 junction with the same land-shells mentioned elsewhere (all of 

 living Maltese species). Several detached bones of the elephants 

 were sun-cracked and honeycombed, as if they had been lying 

 exposed on the surface before their deposition in the gap. Indeed, 

 the appearances presented by this remarkable collection of or- 

 ganic remains seem to me to indicate that water at one time 

 flowed down the gap, and was subject to occasional extraordinary 

 deluges, which bore down the large blocks and whatever exuviae 

 came within reach ; moreover, the conditions were such as we 

 should expect when the land was undergoing a slow subsidence ; 

 thus, by diminishing the force of the stream a deposition of 

 detritus would take place which would raise both its bed and 

 the flood-plain around, and continue so doing as long as the 

 subsidence continued ; calms and floods decreasing or increasing 

 the amount accordingly." 1 There is some difficulty in under- 

 standing how a slow subsidence of the land (supposing such to 

 have taken place at the time the deposits were being accumu- 

 lated) could diminish the force of the streams, unless, indeed, we 

 are to infer that the central area or watershed and gathering- 

 ground sank more rapidly than the lower-lying outskirts. Of 

 this, however— extremely unlikely in itself— we have no proof. 

 The size of the blocks, the pell-mell mixture of deposits, the 

 state of preservation of the organic remains, the enormous masses 

 of breccia and angular gravel — so out of proportion to the limited 

 drainage-area in which they occur — all seem to point, as I have 

 suggested, to extreme winters, to the action of frost and melting 

 snow, etc. And it does seem not improbable that the indica- 



1 Notes of a Naturalist in the Nile Valley and Malta, 1870, p. 191. 



