on the Distribution of Bl'itish Animals. 315 
mation of what many English mineralogists have called dilu- 
mum. 
I considered it needless when I was at Edinburgh, to inves- 
tigate the fact asserted by Dr Fleming at page S98, that a copper 
battle-axe was found in digging the Union Canal at Bonnington, 
in the same kind of clay or till with the tusk of an elephant, as 
its accuracy is questioned by Professor Jameson himself, in a 
note subjoined to the passage in question ; but I here adduce it 
as another of the mistakes that cannot but arise from neglecting 
or denying the distinction between Alluvium and Diluvium, . 
It remains only to notice a few more errors into which Dr 
Fleming has fallen, in his Observations on my History of Bones 
discovered in Caves and Fissures. 
With respect to the habits of modern hyaenas, I have to offer 
him my thanks for the manner in which he has disposed of the 
evidence of Dr Knox, in the fourth volume of the Wernerian 
Memoirs, p. 385, as inapplicable, on the ground of difference 
of species between the Fossil and Cape Hyaena. But I am sur- 
prised he should characterise as valuable the notices of any 
writer who argues, that, because lions and tigers do not devour 
bones, therefore hyaenas also do not eat them ; or that, because 
he himself has never seen an hyaena in the act of dragging off 
its prey, therefore they never do so. Is the positive evidence, 
then, which I have quoted from Brown, Sparman, and Busbe- 
quius, who assert the fact, that hyaenas do drag off their prey, 
to be set aside by the negative fact that Dr Knox has never seen 
them in the act of doing it ? Since the publication of my last 
edition, I have seen an officer from India, Captain Sykes, who 
has often hunted hyaenas in the vicinity of Bombay ; and from 
him I learn that he has not only seen heaps of bones accumu- 
lated at the mouths of their dens, but that, in digging one from 
its hole, he observed large quantities of bones flung out with 
the dirt and rubbish from the interior of the den. 
Dr Fleming, at page 3.01, givtes his opinion, that the bones 
at Plymouth were washed by some Zawd-flood from an open fis- 
sure, and deposited in confusion in the neighbouring caverns.’*' 
Is he then ready to maintain, that the bones in the caves and 
fissures, and the gravel that occurs on the summit of the rock 
at Gibraltar, were deposited also by what he calls a land-flood ? 
