92 GOSSIP ON ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 



may have been also, and the case seems proved, that bones and 

 implements of man have been washed out from the surface, and 

 rolled in the beds or channels of rivers or torrents ; and that lower 

 strata, in which reposed the remains of older animals being reached, 

 that both may have been mingled and further rolled and triturated 

 in the same streams for a long time, before communication with the 

 interior was made — and thus these remains would be identical " in 

 appearance, colour, and chemical condition," — then they may have 

 gone in a mingled mass into the cavernous passages and fissures, 

 and would be found, as Schmerling found his deposits in the Enjis 

 and Engihoul caverns before referred to — at all depths, and their 

 respective ages undistinguishable. 



I cannot discover any good reason why man and many animals 

 now extinct, may not have existed together in the chronologic era, 

 from the creation to the deluge. On the contrary, the evidence 

 appears to me to favour their coexistence. That the Noachian deluge 

 was partial or otherwise, is not now the question — that there was 

 such an event universal tradition would inspire the conviction, even 

 though the record were lost. Allowing then that it extended to 

 northern regions inhabited by man, some of the caverns near the 

 sea, those at Brixham, in Devon, for instance, in which animal bones 

 and fiint implements are found, may be referable to such a disturb- 

 ance, and others to the period immediately after. There are 

 several circumstances connected v/ith the Brixham caves which 

 favour this opinion. Some worn pebbles of hematite found in them, 

 could only have come from their nearest parent rock at a period 

 when the valleys immediately adjoining the caves were much shal- 

 lower than they now are. This may have been the time of the 

 deposition of the gravel and stones in these caves. The reddish 

 loam in which the bones are imbedded, is such as may be seen on 

 the surface of limestone in the neighbourhood ; but the currents 

 which were formerly charged with such mud must have run at a 

 level 78 feet above that of the stream now flowing in the same 

 valley — and to this time we may refer the bone deposits. It 

 accords also with the phenomena of that event, that there is good 

 evidence in the discovery in the mud at the bottom of the bone 

 earth and close to the flint knives, of the entire limb of a cave bear, 

 which must have been introduced clothed with its flesh, or \vith the 



