84 



Prof. J. Prestwich. On the Evidences of a [Mar. 9, 



sible to suppose that animals of such different natures, and having 

 such different habitats, could in life ever have herded together. 

 Difficult as the alternative is, the author sees no other explanation of 

 the phenomena than that of a wide-spread temporary submergence, 

 accompanied by strong earth tremors. In such a case it is easy to 

 conceive that as the waters gradually advanced over the low lands, 

 the animals of the plains would naturally seek safety on the higher 

 grounds and hills. Flying in terror, and cowed by the common 

 danger, the Ruminants and other Herbivores, together with the 

 Carnivores, would, as in the case of the "flooding in our days of large 

 deltas, alike seek refuge on the same safety spot. Where that spot 

 was an isolated hill, they would, if it were not out of reach of the flood 

 waters, eventually suffer the same fate. Subsequently the detached 

 limbs and bones, carried, together with the surface debris, by the 

 effluent currents into the open fissures, were subjected to the clashing 

 of the rubble and the fall of large fragments of rock from the sides 

 of the fissures, and were crushed and broken in the way they are 

 always found. All the results noted are in accordance with the con- 

 sequences that would ensue under these conditions. 



The author then describes how that portion of the Rubble-drift, 

 which was not caught in fissures or hollows, was swept down the 

 sides of the hills during upheaval of the land. Amongst the most 

 illustrative instances of these, is that on the slopes of Mont G-enay, 

 near Semur. This hill, which is 1430 feet high, is capped by a 

 characteristic Oolitic bed, and it is the debris carried down from this 

 bed that forms on the slopes a breccia containing similar remains to 

 those of the fissures at Santenay, together with land shells and flint 

 flakes of human manufacture. Another such mass was cut through 

 by the railway to the east of Mentone, where the base of the lime- 

 stoue cliffs, in which are situated the noted Mentone bone-caves, are 

 covered by a breccia in which were found the remains of Hycena, 

 Cave Bear and other animals, together with flints worked by Man. 



Belgium. — The author recognises the Rubble- drift in the angular 

 debris termed by M. Dupont " argile a blocaux " which partly masks, as 

 with the Gower caves, some of the celebrated bone-caves near Dinant. 

 It forms a thin layer between the cave deposits and a deposit of the 

 Stone Age, thus defining clearly its geological position. It contains, 

 when fronting the caves, the remains of Reindeer, Ox, Horse, &c, 

 which has led to its being classed with the cave deposits, but the 

 author thinks that those remains have been derived from the beds 

 which it overlies and has partly denuded. 



Gibraltar. — The Atlantic waves have left few traces of raised beaches 

 and "head " on the western coasts of Spain and Portugal, but on the 

 Rock of Gibraltar there are traces of several raised beaches, covered 

 in places by local angular rubble (or head). This rubble extends 



