1871.] A Geological Problem. 331 



on this point, says, " I should state that, after having for a 

 long time shared the belief of Cuvier, I have arrived at a 

 contrary opinion." * 



It is much to be desired that some one would do for bones, 

 including those of man, what Dr. Lindley did for plants, and 

 ascertain by experiment how long-continued immersion in 

 water would affect them. In the meantime, however, we 

 are not without reason for believing that human bones soon 

 disappear when thus exposed. In 1853 the Dutch Govern- 

 ment succeeded in converting the Lake of Haarlem into dry 

 land, and thus added 45,000 acres to the soil of Holland. 

 There had been many shipwrecks and naval fights on this 

 sheet of water ; from thirty to forty thousand souls had 

 their homes on its borders, and hundreds of men had found a 

 watery grave in it. The canals and trenches dug to a con- 

 siderable depth through the rescued land must have had an 

 aggregate length of thousands of miles ; yet not a single 

 human bone was exhumed from first to last. Some arms, a 

 few coins, and one or two wrecked vessels alone rewarded 

 the antiquaries, who watched the operations in the hope of a 

 rich harvest. Here, as in cavern deposits and river gravels 

 generally, works of art alone furnished evidence of the 

 existence of man, even though no part of the deposit could be 

 more than three hundred years old, as the lake was formed 

 by an inundation towards the end of the sixteenth century. t 

 II. If it be true that no portion of the human skeleton 

 has ever been found in association with the extinct cave 

 animals, the literature of the question bristles with un- 

 mistakable and grave errors, as we shall now proceed to 

 show : — 



In 1824, tne R- ev - Dr. Fleming published a paper, in 

 which he objected, apparently on good grounds, to some 

 of the speculations of Dr. Buckland, in his " Reliquiae 

 Diluvianae, published the year before, and distinctly stated 

 that " Man was an inhabitant of this country at the time 

 these animals, now extinct, flourished, his bones and his 

 instruments having been found in similar situations with 

 their remains. J 



Mr, W. L. Wrey, F.G.S., who during many years resided 

 in South Wales, between Llanelly and Llandeilo, recently 

 informed us that in 1831 he heard of the discovery of a 

 cavern in his immediate vicinity, in the ordinary course of 



* See Anthropological Review, vol. i., p. 333, 1863. 



t See Lyell's Antiquity of Man, p. 147 et seq. 



X See " Remarks illustrative of the Influence of Society on the Distribution of 

 British Animals," in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, vol. xi., pp. 287 

 —305. 



