hunter's posthumous paper on fossils. 321 



take a new turn [through localities] in which are deposited human 

 bones, many may be found ; for, in sinking the caissons for Blackfriars 

 Bridge, a human skull was found twelve feet under the bed of the 

 river." — P. liv. 



Hunter again returns to the subject of the evidences of geological 

 action and of change of climate afforded by fossil remains, in the fol- 

 lowing passages. " As most of the extraneous fossils we find are the 

 remains of sea-animals, it becomes the basis of our argument that 

 the superficial native fossils were formed or accumulated at the bottom 

 of the waters, and therefore we must suppose that the sea must have 

 been in those situations where we now find the extraneous fossils, and 

 there they must have been fossilized while the sea was upon them. 

 This leads to the investigation of what might be called the progressive 

 motion of the waters ; but how far there is any systematical regularity 

 in this shifting of the sea, time alone can discover ; for there are little 

 signs of it. 



" We may observe that most countries have some of both vegetables 

 and animals peculiar to themselves, although many vegetables and 

 animals are common to every one ; and this peculiarity is more confined 

 to latitude than longitude ; therefore if we were to reason entirely from 

 the present vegetables and animals on this globe, we should suppose 

 that the vegetables and animals found in a fossil state in any latitude 



to the 'Maccagnone Cave,' he draws the following inferences : — that it " was filled up 

 to the roof within the human period, so that a thick layer of bone-splinters, teeth, 

 land-shells, coprolites of Hymna, and human objects, was agglutinated to the roof by 

 the infiltration of water holding lime in solution ; that subsequently, and within the 

 human period, such a great amount of change took place in the physical configura- 

 tion of the district as to have caused the cave to be washed out and emptied of its 

 eontents, excepting the floor breccia and the patches of material cemented to the 

 roof, and since coated with additional stalagmite." — P. 136. 



Sir Charles Lyell believes "the antiquity of the Abbeville and Amiens flint instru- 

 ments to be great indeed if compared to the times of history or tradition It 



must have required a long period for the wearing down of the chalk which supplied 

 the broken flints for the formation of so much gravel at various heights, sometimes 

 100 feet above the present level of the Somme, for the deposition of fine sediment, 

 including entire shells, both terrestrial and aquatic, and also for the denudation 

 which the entire mass of stratified drift has undergone, portions having been swept 

 away, so that what remains of it often terminates abruptly in old river-cliffs, besides 

 being covered by an unstratified drift. To explain these changes, I should infer con- 

 siderable oscillations in the level of the land in that part of France — slow movements 

 of upheaval and subsidence, deranging, but not wholly displacing, the course of 

 ancient rivers. Lastly, the disappearance of the elephant, rhinoceros, and other 

 genera of quadrupeds, now foreign to Europe, implies, in like manner, a vast lapse 

 of ages, separating the era in which the fossil implements were framed and that of 

 the invasion of Gaul by the Romans." — Address, on opening the Section of Geology, 

 at the Meeting of the British Association at Aberdeen, Sept. 15th, 1850.] 



Y 



