114 HISTORY OP THE EARTH. 
and bristles was gathered from the wet sand bank into which they 
had been trampled by the white bears whilst devouring the car- 
cass. This warm and abundant covering indicates, that Siberia 
was the same cold and frozen region before the deluge as at the 
present day : in other words that the position of the earth's axis 
has not been changed. 
Burnet represented that the earth consisted originally of a thin 
crust covering an abyss of water ; which crust was broken up for 
the production of the deluge, and formed the mountains by its 
fragments. Woodward held that this catastrophe was occasioned 
by a temporary suspension of the attraction of cohesion ; the whole 
mass of the globe was reduced to a soft paste which became pen- 
etrated by shells. Deluc's opinion was, that the sea now occupies 
the situation of the ancient continents, and that what is now dry 
land, was, antecedently to the deluge, the bed of the sea. That event 
was therefore produced by the subsidence of what had been the 
most elevated parts of the crust of the earth, and the elevation of 
those which had been the lowest. 
58. Dr. Buckland, Professor of Geology in the University of 
Oxford, refuted all these differenthypotheses and others with them, 
at once, and proved that what is dry, inhabited land now, was dry, 
inhabited land before the deluge : also that at an era that is com- 
paratively recent in the history of the earth, England was the 
abode of those races of animals which are seldom found at the pre- 
sent day, if ever, beyond the limits of the torrid zone. 
In the summer of 1821, some workmen who were engaged in 
carrying on the operations of a large limestone quarry in the side 
of a hill near the village of Kirkdale in Yorkshire, Eng., acciden- 
tally intersected the mouth of a long hole or cavern, closed exter- 
nally with rubbish, and overgrown with grass and bushes. The 
bottom of the cavern was covered to the average depth of about 
a foot, with a bed of soft mud or loam. None of this sediment 
was found attached to the sides or roof. It was itself covered 
over with a plating of stalagmite, or that calcareous matter which 
often forms an incrustation on the sides and bottom of limestone 
caverns. There was no alternation of layers of stalagmite and 
loam, but beneath the loam, there was another coating of stalag- 
mite, reposing upon and covering the bottom of the cavern. On 
breaking through theupper covering of the sediment, and digging 
into it, it was found that, all the lower part of it, and also the sta- 
lagmite beneath, held enveloped an immense quantity of small 
fragments of bone. The workmen at first supposed them to have 
belonged to cattle that died of a murrain in this district a few 
years before, and they were neglected, and thrown upon the roads 
with the common limestone. At length however they attracted 
attention, and were found to include the remains of no fewer than 
twenty three different species of animals — the Hyena, Tiger, Bear, 
Wolf, Fox, Weasel, Elephant, Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, Horse, 
Ox, threespecies of Deer, Hare, Rabbit, Water-Rat, Mouse, Raven, 
