THE GEOLOGIST 



DECEMBER, 1861. 



SOME OBSERVATION'S ON THE ACCUMULATION OF 

 CAVE-DEPOSITS. 



Br the Rev. Henry Eley, M.A., F.G.S. 



The usual mode of accounting for the bone-breccias so eommonly 

 found in caverns open to tlie day can scarcely be considered by any 

 body as quite satisfactory. It seems usually taken for granted that 

 that mixture of sand, clay, small stones, and fragments of bone 

 must necessarily have been brought there by streams of water, or 

 washed in by waves. And yet in many instances — perhaps in by far 

 the great majority of instances — nothing can be imagined as much 

 less likely to have happened than the aggregation of such materials 

 by any means of that kind : that it should have been an occurrence 

 of almost universal prevalence may well be deemed impossible. For 

 under what circumstance can it be conceived that floods of water, in 

 every region where open caverns exist in the rocks, should have 

 picked up a heterogeneous collection of bones just in time to lay 

 them quietly down again in every hole into which the muddy stream 

 could gain access ? For we must really suppose so well-timed an 

 acquisition of future fossils, before we can admit the usually received 

 hypothesis of the manner in which they were deposited where we 

 find them ; since no one can suppose that the whole of the solid 

 matter borne along by any great flood—not to say by every such 

 VOL. iv. 3 M 



