284 BONE CAVE AT PORT KENNEDY. ■ 



catastrophe seemed further inferable from the thickness of the remains. Had the 

 animals fallen in inadvertently, one by one, as has been suggested, had a long- 

 interval elapsed between the fate of the first and last victim, more stones and 

 earth, more vegetable matter would doubtless have fallen into the chasm to become 

 intermingled with the bones. 



Admitting the previous death and fleshy decomposition of the animals, as 

 before supposed, we cannot reasonably infer that any natural transporting agent 

 could have gathered together in this fashion the heterogeneous skeletons of creatures 

 dead at various spots ; that through various causes it could have sifted them com- 

 paratively free from mixed debris, and finally washing them in one of the currents 

 of a wide-spread flood to the top of a submerged hill, there tumbled them into a chasm. 



Not unreasonably, therefore, we may suppose not only that the creatures had 

 perished together, but a,lso that they had perished on the spot or at the chasm — not 

 meeting their fate during a long interval of time, and through a long series of 

 chance tumbles, but suddenly and by force of a single event. 



The cause to be imagined is one that would not only destroy the animals, but one 

 that would bring them to the chasm together and there destroy them, so depositing 

 the remains as to prevent their subsequent scattering, and while it may be supposed 

 that a large forest fire could have so stampeded the creatures as to drive them pell 

 mell into the fissure, the evidence more reasonably indicates that the destructive 

 event was a wide spread inundation, and for the following reasons : — 



Because no sure proof of the action of fire was found either upon the bones or 

 the vegetable remains ; because a large inundation was already proved at the spot 

 which, having covered the top of the hill and tumbled into the cave, had, as before 

 shown, accounted for the deposition of the bones ; and because evidence of a great 

 Hood is further apparent in the existence of several other adjacent subterranean 

 passages filled with stratified sand and clay. For these reasons it seems super- 

 fluous to suggest any other kind of natural phenomenon as a probable explanation 

 of the death of the animals. 



Let us suppose the advance of an overwhelming flood whose quick waves, 

 submerging the surrounding region, drive in terror the inhabitants of the forest to 

 higher ground. Led by chance direction of flight, the quarter of visible approach 

 of the water, or the slope of land, the horde hurries up the hill-side in question 

 where by chance the chasm, interrupting their path, receives many living animals 

 pressed pell mell into the hole by the force of onrushing bodies. Killed by the 

 fall, crushed by the weight of superincumbent carcasses or drowned by the quick 

 following water (which, though it then doubtless entered the fissure, could not have 

 done so in sufficent volume to cover the bodies with debris, since the skeletons 

 did not lie intact), we may reasonably imagine the death of the animals followed 

 by the gradual decomposition of their flesh and denudation of their bones. Such 

 exposure to the action of the air and possibly water, regarded as a preface to 

 one or more subsequent inundations, probably greater than the first, fairly accounts 

 for the facts. The latter freshet or freshets again overwhelming the chasm, falling 



