938 PROFESSOR J. PRESTWICK OK THE EYIDEKCES OF A SUBMERGENCE 
Nor is it easy to conceive that under extreme glacial conditions, herds of such 
animals should have resorted to high hills in the midst of ice and snow fields, instead 
of retreating before the ice and keeping to the open plains and richer pastures. That 
Wolves and Bears should, before the rising of the waters, have inhabited the caves 
of St. Aubin and St. Jean lower down the mountain sides, and carried to those caves 
the prey which they pursued in the plains around, is readily understood ; but it is incon¬ 
ceivable that under any ordinary circumstances the predaceous animals and their victims 
should have congregated together on the summit of a high, steep, and isolated hill. 
Another suggestion was that towards the close of the Quaternary period, the 
rainfall was so excessive that it flooded the plains and obliged the animals to seek 
refuge on the higher ground, where they congregated in great numbers, and eventually 
succumbed to the rain, cold, and hunger, or to the attacks of the predaceous animals 
of the caves below, their bones being then dispersed and carried by the diluvial 
rainfall into the open fissures. In support, however, of this suggestion it had to be 
assumed that the rainfall was one hundred times greater than at present, and that 
the waters rose at the rate of one metre daily, but although the rainfall during much 
of the Quaternary period was no doubt very heavy, it is a physical impossibility that 
without a change in the level of the land, the waters could ever have been piled 
up in the manner here required. It is evident also from the condition of the bones, 
that the animals whose remains are entombed in the breccia did not fall a prey to 
predaceous animals. 
The general opinion amongst the members present was that the animals had fallen 
victims to floods, but whether caused either by dams of ice, the melting of snow- 
fields, or excessive rainfall, was left indeterminate. 
The condition and position of the bones are, on the other hand, at Santenay and 
Pedemar, as they are at Oreston and Catsdown, such as might result from the eflects 
of a gradual submergence of the land. For a submergence of the character I have 
described would naturally drive the animals in the plains to seek refuge on the 
higher hills. Flying in terror and cowed by the common danger, the Carnivora and 
Herbivora alike sought refuge on the same spot, and alike suftered the same fate 
wherever the hill was isolated and not of a height sufficient for them to escape the 
advancing dood. We may suppose the subsidence to have been so slow that there 
was no sudden rush of water to carry the bodies far away, so that as they 
decayed, the limbs fell and were scattered and dispersed irregularly on the submarine 
surface. When that surface was again upheaved, the bones and detached limbs, 
together with the detritus on that surface, were, as I have before explained,* carried 
that even in extremely hot weather large fissures, in which the young game is lost, are opened in the 
ground in the south of Spain. It is also well-known that in many countries—Greece, for example—the 
remains of animals are sometimes carried down by the streams into large swallow holes. But special 
results attend all these cases, and the swallow holes are situated in low grounds and not on hill-tops. 
* ‘Quart. Jour. Geol. Soc.,’ vol. 48, p. 340. 
