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sometimes they have been quite filled, leaving no room for 
modern additions. 
The entrances to land-caves containing these remains of 
animals are usually on some hill-side ; and even many marine 
caves, such as those very remarkable ones at Gower, in South 
Wales, have, as the only access, some hole seen halfway up a 
steep and precipitous cliff. 
The singular caverns of Yorkshire and Somersetshire, and 
some of those in Derbyshire ; the caverns on the banks of the 
Meuse, near Namur ; those of Franconia, in Germany; those of 
Sicily, and many others very remarkable for then osseous con- 
tents, are unmistakably above the level of any running water 
in the vicinity. Most of them are more, many of them much 
more, than sixty feet above the adjacent valley, through which 
streams run. A question hence arises as to the mode in which 
water can have had access ; and often there are no convenient 
paths by which a large animal could now drag its prey. There 
is thus suggested a difficulty which a httle further investigation 
tends to increase rather than explain. The animals whose 
remains are so abundant are not merely now absent, but no 
account of then existence in a living state is handed down to 
us. Nay, so far from the species being either familiar or 
historical, we are inclined to suppose that they never could have 
lived in the neighbourhood so long as the land and water and 
the climate existed as they do now. Perhaps this idea is not 
quite so well based as people have generally believed. In 
England and Western Europe the animals whose remains are 
most common in caverns are a very gigantic species of bear, 
now nowhere met with, but more resembling the grisly bear of 
California than the black bear of Europe, and a gigantic species 
of hysena, compared with which the largest existing species is 
not worthy to be named. Moreover, this hyaena is related 
much more closely to the southern type peculiar now to the 
Cape of Good Hope than to the hyaenas of Abyssinia and Asia 
Minor. When, therefore, we find indications of a long succes- 
sion of such tribes, and that they carried into their dens the 
bones, not only of deer and oxen and other animals now 
belonging to the surrounding country, but of some altogether 
gone and lost to us, there is additional reason for assuming 
that the caverns teach a lesson in the history of the world, and 
require special consideration. 
Among the creatures that inhabited Europe at the time when 
the caverns, or some of them, were the dens of wild beasts, we 
must rank the elephant, the rhinoceros, a remarkable deer of 
very large size and with horns of enormous spread, and a 
distinct variety, if not species, of bovine animal, of which the 
Aurochs of the Lithuanian forest is the nearest type. That 
