Preface. xi 



accustomed to sudden interruptions before my programme 

 was completed, I had no alternative but to submit to the 

 decrees of fortune, and break fresh ground where she chose 

 to place me. Our vessel reached Gibraltar in the course of a 

 few days, when I enjoyed a hurried visit to the famous bone- 

 caves of the Rock. Among members of the public services, 

 civil, naval, and military, whose avocations call them fre- 

 quently, and at very short notice and considerable risks, to 

 sojourn in foreign and often inhospitable lands, there is a 

 small class who, without any professed knowledge of science, 

 collect stores of natural objects, which they freely deposit in 

 home museums or hand over to the cabinet naturalist for 

 description. Such an example, and one of the most pains- 

 taking and indefatigable, was the late Captain Brome. This 

 enterprising cave explorer, by means of the military prisoners 

 under his command, conducted a series of excavations which 

 eventuated in very important discoveries in connection with 

 the bygone history of the Rock, during periods far anterior 

 to any written records, but possibly coeval with the presence 

 of man on this portion of Spain, when there was a direct 

 land communication between the two continents. These 

 researches would therefore be of intense interest to me, in 

 connection with similar phenomena I had been investigating 

 in the little insular group just left; inasmuch as, when the 

 two are compounded, they furnish very cogent proofs of 

 the great physical changes which the entire basin of the 

 Mediterranean has undergone during epochs no doubt far 

 back in the ordinary computation of time, but of modern date 

 in the chronology of the geologist. Nineteen days after 

 leaving Gibraltar we entered the Bay of Fundy, and shortly 

 afterwards proceeded to New Brunswick, where the following 

 notes were taken. These I will now lay before the reader, 

 much in the same form as I have already attempted to 

 describe the natural objects of other lands. 



Here I must express my obligations to those gentlemen 



