on the D'lStrihutlari (^British Animals. 317 ^ 
any river should flow, or ever have flowed there. The cave at 
Wokey is a connected series of large and lofty vaults, with two 
apertures near its floor, by which a subterranean river at this 
moment runs in and out continually ; whilst that at Kirkdale is a 
small hole, (seldom larger than a large gutter hole), not five 
feet square at its mouth, and branching internally into smaller 
ramifications, which finally terminate in a close end, or cul de sac ; 
so that by no possibility could any river now, or at any past 
time, have found a passage through it. 
I fully agree with the observation quoted from Mr Young, 
that the cave at Kirkdale is not a fissure in the rock, and that it 
has a number of rounded hollows or depressions in the sides and 
roofs, (and possibly on the floor, though I have never seen 
them there), resembling such water- worn hollows as we see in 
rocks, in the beds of rivers, or on the shores of the ocean ; but 
I must add, that the appearance of such hollows is a feature 
fcommon to the cave of Kirkdale, with every other cave in lime- 
stone rocks that I have ever examined ; and in every case there 
is decided evidence that the hollows have not been produced by 
friction from moving water, in the fact, that, though not unlike 
in shape, they are never smooth and polished like the holes 
worn'in the beds of rivers, and on the sea-shores, but are con- 
stantly rough and studded over internally, like a corroded pre- 
paration, with thousands of small and delicate points, projecting 
in high relief over these surfaces, and which would inevitably 
have been destroyed, had friction or any kind of violence been 
employed in producing the cavities in question. 
In reply to the note at page 300, in which the authority of 
Professor Goldfiiss, is quoted by the editor to support an opi- 
nion, that the elk and hyaena are the animals intended by 
the terms schelch and halh-woTf in the romance of the Niebelun- 
gen written in the 13th century, and enumerated among the 
beasts slain in a hunt a few hundred years before that time, in 
Germany ; I have only to observe, that the authority of the 
same romance, would equally establish the actual existence of 
giants, dwarfs, and pigmies, of magic tarn caps, the using of 
which would make the wearer become invisible ; and of fire-dra- 
gons, whose blood rendered the skin of him who bathed in it of 
