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Sect. VI.] 



GEOLOGY. 



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together. Every bone, if found even six inches beneath 

 the black vegetable mould, should be collected : there 

 can be no doubt that many most valuable relics have 

 been neglected, from the supposition that they belonged 

 to still living animals. Low cliffs of mud. 



ravel, and 

 3S (as well 



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lYom them), are the most likelv 

 places for the discovery of the remains of quadrupeds. 

 Gravel beds under streams of lava ; fissures in volcanic 

 rocks ; peat beds, and the clay or marl underlying' neat, 

 are all favourable places. Fishes' bones are found occa- 

 sionally in all sedimentary strata, and are highly inte- 

 resting. 



Caverns. — These most frequently occur in limestone 

 rocks, and they have yielded a truly wonderful harvest of 

 remains in Europe, South America, and Australia. The 

 bor generally occur in mud, under a stalagmi tic crust 

 produced by the drinp:..g of the lirae-charsed water. 



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wiuch requires being broken up by a pickaxe. As ca- 

 ,v..n3 have often been used by wnld races of man as 

 places of habitation and burial, a most careful examina- 

 tion ^^ ould be made to detect 

 havi' ■ 



gns 



: been anciently broken up near where the bones 

 are found. Even small islands, not now inhabited by 

 any land quadruped, if not very distant from a continent, 

 are almost as likely to contain osseous remains as larger 

 tract-^ of land. The interest of the discovery of the re- 

 mr'ns of land quadrupeds in an oceanic island would be 

 extreme : for instance, it has been stated that the tooth 

 of a mastodon has been found in one of the Azores ; if 

 tius were confirmed, few geologists would doubt that 



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