THE MEDITERRANEAN NATURALIST 
120 
among the sedges appears to have aroused several 
large turtles for yonder are two or three of them 
slowly making for the water, weighed down by 
the large osseous carapaces, that stand them in 
such good stead as a protection from the numerous 
enemies around them. 
And now that we have seen the bright side of 
Nature in these favoured regions shall we remain 
to observe it in its darker aspects? 
Shall we remain to watch nature in her labour 
throes ; while these land areas are being riven 
from end to end by the convulsive efforts of the 
subterranean forces that are constantly accumula- 
ting beneath them; and when the three henchmen 
of Nature, Fire, Air, and Water shall combine to 
wipe out of existence all traces of the fertility, and 
abundance that we now see before us. 
No! such scenes are not for us. We will 
retrace our steps and in the quiet and seclusion 
of the valleys and gorges, in the caverns and 
on the plains we shall find an abundance of 
eloquent witnesses of the vissicitudes that the 
islands have undergone since those remote ages. 
The cliffs and scaurs still rear aloft their ruin cres- 
ted summits in all their primaeval ruggedness, and 
the caverns and gorges, from their glooomy, awe 
inspiring depths still furnish us with mementoes 
of the creatures that formerly dwelt within their 
precints. 
But the forests have now gone, the rivers and 
lakes have disappeared, and where once they ex- 
tended nought now remains but a heaving waste 
of waters. The Maltese Islands are all that is left 
of the once extensive area that joined the two 
great continents; and even they have been so 
changed that but for the animal remains that have 
been locked up and sealed within their caves it 
would have been difficult, if not impossible, to 
have been able to have demonstrated the intimate 
relations which we now know the islands formerly 
bore to the land areas on either side of them. But 
for these same evidences, the scenes that once 
made these islands so “fresh and fair” would long 
since have passed from the mind of man, 
and have melted away among the misty shadows 
of antiquity, and so that portion of the chain of 
events that links Malta past with Malta present 
would have been irrecoverably lost to us, 
And even now we can conceive of a time when, 
in the never-ending cycle of changes which governs 
Nature’s actions all of these evidences too will be 
ultimately effaced, and in the memory of future 
generations the history of the islands’s occupation 
by man, and indeed, its very existence will, like a 
cloud rapidly drifting out of sight, have sunk be- 
hind the horizon of human forgetfulness. 
But that stage has not yet been reached. 
The caverns and their entombed remains are 
still left to us; and they serve to bridge over 
the gulf of time that separates the past from 
the present. Within the precints of these mau- 
soleums of Nature we ffnd the most incongruous 
associations: there the bones of the elephant lie 
peacefully with those of the dormouse, and the 
remains of the hippopotamus comingle with those 
of the swan. 
The very nature of the physical conditions 
that endured at the time w 7 hen these heter- 
ogeneos masses of animal remains were thus 
gathered together, is there photographed in the 
sands, clays, and breccias that lie so abundantly 
along the lines of valleys and the coasts of the 
islands. 
But of these I shall have more to say when 
considering the superficial accumulations of the 
Quarternary period. 
The majority of the ossiferous caves of Malta 
are to be found in the Oligocene strata, as it 
is the beds that comprise this series that are 
the best adapted for withstanding the erosive 
action of the atmosphere. 
Of these the principal are the Gandia Fissure, 
the Shantin Fissure, the Zebbug Cave, the 
Malak Cave, the Middle Cave, the Mnadra Gap, 
the Benhisa Gap, St. Leonard’s Fissure, and 
the Melliha Cave. 
The Gandia Fissure is situated in the Lower 
Coralline Limestone about a quarter of a mile 
from the village of Micabiba. It was system- 
atically explored by Dr. Leith Adams in the 
year 1865 , ( 1 ) and a considerable quantity of 
elephants bones and molars, remains of dormice, 
and bones of aquatic birds were found intermixed 
with the red earth with which the rent was 
filled. J 
(1) Adams A. L, “ Nile Valley and Malta ”, 
p, p, 165, 
