NOTES AND QIIKRIKS. 
117 
NOTES AND QUERIES. 
Human Remains near KNAiiEsnmiouGU. — Dear Sir, — The accompanying 
note may interest some of your readers, and will, I hope, receive elucidation 
from soine of your correspondents. — Yours truly. Homo Fossilis." 
Near Knaresborougli, in a cavity of tlie limestone strata, twenty-seven feet 
below the surface, remains of six human skeletons were discovered imbedded in 
fine alluvial clay, wliich was covered with large water-worn boulders. This 
cave, or fissure, is described as a natural cavity in the limestone rock, seven 
feet wide, five feet high, and of considerable length ; it communicated with the 
surface by an irregular perpendicular fissure, wide enough to allow a full-grown 
man to pass. A small spring of water trickles do\vn the side of this opening, 
and is lost in the porous limestone below. The skull of a dog, and jaw-bone 
of an ox were found with the human bones ; no vestiges of works of art were 
observed. The provincial paper ("Harrowgatc Herald," October, 1852), from 
which this account is taken, suggests that these remains are of persons who 
sought for refuge in this cave from their enemies, and being discovered by the 
latter were stoned to death! An ingenious idea, certainly. One of the 
skeletons is said to be of a youiig adult woman. 
Slickensides. — Noticing, after the late thaws, in riding by railway to tovra, 
as I have often done before, that the numerous slips of earth in the embank- 
ments and cuttings presented at their planes of separation and slide smooth 
and polished surfaces very like, if not indeed identical with, ordinary " slicken- 
sides," I have thought a mere note of these common occurrences might con- 
vey to many others that which they have seemed to suggest to myself, that 
slickensides on the large scale might often be due to no other more complex 
cause than the effects of wet and the natural slidiug action of mere subsidence. 
— Ed. Geol. 
Suggestion respecting Provincial Museums. — Among the valuable con- 
tributions to science published by the Government Ordnance Survey, one is an 
Essay on the Educational Uses of Museums, from the pen of the late dis- 
tinguished Edinburgh University Professor, Edward Forbes. In this essay I 
find the following passage. 
" When the inquii-er goes from one province to another, from one county to 
another, he seeks first for local collections. In almost every town, of any size 
or consequence, he finds a public museum ; but how often does he find any 
5 art of that museum devoted to the illustration of the productions of the 
istrict ? The very feature which of all others would give interest and value 
to the collection, wliich would render it most useful for teaching-purposes, has 
in most instances been omitted, or so treated as to be altogether useless. Un- 
fortunately, not a few country museums are little better than raree shows. 
* * * Curiosities from the South Seas — relics worthless in themselves, de- 
riving then." interest from association with persons or localities — a few bacUy 
stuffed quadi-upeds, rather more birds, a stuffed snake, a skinned alligator, part 
of an Egyptian mummy, Indian gods, a case or two of shells — the bivalves 
usually single, and the univalves decorticated — a sea-urchin without its spines, 
a few common corals, the fruit of a double cocoa-nut, some mixed antiquities — 
partly local, partly Etruscan, partly Roman and Egyptian — and a case of 
minerals and miscellaneous fossils ; such is the mventory and about the scientific 
order of their contents." — Edward Forbes, on Educational Uses of Museums, 
page 13. 
