THE GEOLOGIST. 
DECEMBER, 1861. 
SOME OBSERYATIONfS OX THE ACCUMULATION OF 
CAVE-DEPOSITS. 
Br THE Rev. Hexry Eley, M.A., F.G.S. 
The usual mode of accounting for the bone-Lreccias so commonly 
found in caverns open to the 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 cavenis 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 
