BEACHES, ETC., OE THE SOUTH OE ENGLAND. 335 



lesser valleys on the northern slopes of the same Chalk range, 

 would readily be accounted for by the same cause. The red loam- 

 with-flints before mentioned, carried down from the Eed Clay-with- 

 flints on to the slopes of the Chalk hills in many parts of Kent, is 

 explicable in the same way. It would swell this paper to too great 

 dimensions were I to describe the innumerable instances of the 

 occurrence of this drift in the South of England. I have marked 

 some of the most notable on the Map (PI. YIII.), and have in each 

 case indicated the direction of the current by an arrow. 



Ossiferous Fissures. — Nor do I see anj?- other explanation that so 

 well meets all the conditions of the ossiferous breccia in the fissures 

 of the limestones of Devonshire and Pembrokeshire. The use of 

 the term ' cavern ' in speaking of these fissures, which still pre- 

 vails,^ is misleading. In a few instances, the open fissures may have 

 been the resort of animals before they were filled by detritus, though 

 that is doubtful. De la Beche used the better term of ' Ossiferous 

 Fissures.' Still Buckland spoke of the bones occurring in caverns,^ 

 but he made his meaning clear in a subsequent page (p. 73) when he 

 said : " The bones appeared to us to have been washed down from 

 above at the same time with the mud and fragments of limestone, 

 through which they are dispersed ; they were entirely without order, 

 and not in entire skeletons ; occasionally fractured, but not rolled." 

 Dr. Buckland also noticed that in one of the fissures at Oreston the 

 drift " was stratified, or rather sorted and divided into laminae of 

 sand, earth, and clay, varying in fineness," but all referable to the 

 surface of the adjacent district. 



The fissures are sometimes vertical, at other times inclined. 

 Mr. Pengelly remarks that at Oreston the bones occur alike " in the 

 cemented and uncemented portions of the bed. They were found 

 alike at all heights or levels, in the lumps of breccia, in the pure 

 stalagmite between them, and in the looser and less coherent portion 

 of the accumulation, thereby suggesting that the cavern was 

 slowly and gradually filled with limestone-debris . . . with occa- 

 sional pauses or periods of cessation ; the proof of such pauses being 

 the frequent presence of the portions of pure stalagmite separating 

 series of brecciated masses . . . lying one above another in the 

 same nearly vertical plane." ^ 



I need add nothing to these passages, for they accurately describe 

 the character of the breccia and the position of the bones. But, not 

 having been fortunate enough to be at Oreston at the time when 

 bones were found there, I felt a little doubt about the meaning to 

 be attached to the terms ' cavern ' and ' stalagmite.' Mr. Pengelly 

 informs me, however, that in the use of these terms he by no means 

 intends to imply that besides the ossiferous fissures there had been 

 caves " inhabited by man or any of the inferior animals," and that 

 he has no doubt the fissures were filled in from above. 



Similar fissures, filled by the introduction of accumulations through 



^ Phillips's ' Manual of Geology,' new ed. (1885) vol. ii. p. 685. 



^ ' Reliquiae Diluvianse,' p. 67. 



3 ' The Geologist ' for 1859, p. 442. 



