116 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
and the roof have since been removed by the quarrymen, and transported 
in the routine of their trade to IJfracombe or Barnstaple ; so that no cave 
exists there now ; and the old earthy floor which contained the bones . . . 
is covered with soil and fragments of the blasted rock. 
" Bones of the following animals were extracted from it : — Mammoth 
{ElejjJias primigenius), rhinoceros {Bhinoceros leptorhinus), lion, or tiger 
{Felis tigris), hytena {Hyana spelcea), bear {Ursus spelcBus), horse {Equiis 
cahallits), ox, deer, wolf, fox — in short, the usual cave osseous remains of 
extinct, together with bones of pigs, sheep, and other recent animals, some 
identical with those which still inhabit the district. There also were found 
bones of fish, and dorsal spines of a species of ray. The elevation of this 
cave is upwards of 100 feet above the sea, and some of the bones in this 
collection show the same teeth-marks described by Buckland on those of 
the Kirkdale caves. Several have been gnawed by larger animals, and 
some bear marks as of the teeth of a rodent, some rat perhaps. 
" The circumstances of this cave in general, and of some of the bones in 
particular, did not confirm, but rather contradict, the conjecture that it 
had once been a den of hysenas, by whom they were collected together. 
Hyaenas' bones lay about precisely in the same state as the others. The 
whole seemed to have been forcibly carried into the cave by the action of 
water. Some of the bones were wedged into the fissures of the rock at 
the cave's ends, just as pieces of drift-wood and wreck are observed to be 
on the shore beneath. Even had the dung of the hysena been observed 
here, as in those caves described in the ' Reliquiee Diluvianse,' and in Dr. 
Falconer's report of the ossiferous caverns in Italy, the inference would 
have been hasty, and probably altogether wrong, that it therefore had 
been an hyana's den. The hyaena is by nature a bone- rather than a 
flesh-eating animal : the dung-balls consequently are almost entirely 
formed of phosphate of lime, and are so hard that they resist the tempo- 
rary action of water almost as well as the bones themselves — perhaps, 
being round, even better. Moreover, if these cave-dwellers, which live in 
pairs and are not gregarious, follow the habits of canine animals, and of 
the badgers and foxes which abound still in this part of the kingdom, 
they would instinctively have sought external, and even distant places. 
Dogs are notorious for their cleanly habits in respect to their sleeping- 
places, when they are not chained up ; and badgers retire to some place 
distant from their holeSj and to that same place every night, till at length 
the ground even glitters in the sunshine with ^he elytra of the beetles, 
chiefly the Scarahceus stercorarius, which in summer-time forms their prin- 
cipal food, as earth-worms do in the winter. 
*' The impression of the writer of this notice is, that all these ancient 
bones were drifted into the cave by the force of watei*, after they had been 
gnawed and mumbled outside of it, and that the dung-balls of the hyaena 
were drifted in with them. Careful observers will have noticed how 
water-floods collect together into the still places animal remains and light 
substances at all times. 
" We may account for the filling of these caverns in more ways than one. 
There are in this neighbourhood, and in other parts of England, at this 
moment, certain holes and natural openings in the earth, particularly 
where the mountain-limestone lies near the surface, into which rain-tor- 
rents discharge themselves, thick with the red mud, and with lighter sub- 
stances and small stones, which they bear along down the watercourses 
leading to them. These watercourses formed many of the ancient byeroads 
and lanes of the country. There is one so situated that has engaged the 
writer's attention in flood-time for more than twenty years ; nor is the 
