Extracts from British and Foreign Journals. 
STRANGE ACCUMULATION OE BONES. 
In a lecture lately delivered by Professor Ansted, he says: 
—“In the cavern at San Ciro, near Palermo, there is an enor¬ 
mous deposit of bones. Twenty tons 5 weight of the bones of 
the hippopotamus have actually been taken from it within a 
very recent time for the sake of burning into animal charcoal. 
Now, it is quite clear that there can have been no accumula¬ 
tion of bones of this kind by human agency. All the hippo¬ 
potamuses ever brought into Italy by the Romans, if accu¬ 
mulated together, could hardly have sufficed to fill this one 
cave; and, not far off, bones of 300 individual hippopota¬ 
muses have been found in another cave. It is quite clear 
that the cavern existed for a long period as the habitation 
and burial place of the large quadruped whose bones are so 
abundant. In our own country the caverns have been used 
for similar purposes. In the limestone rocks in Yorkshire, 
Devonshire, and elsewhere, there is good proof that they 
served as dens, for we find in them the remains of bears and 
hyaenas in enormous numbers, and occasionally remains of 
elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses. Generally 
speaking*, each cave seems to have been inhabited by one 
group of animals, and as the caverns have generally been 
partly excavated by water and partly filled up by aqueous 
drift, so, in some instances, they have been entirely filled up, 
and almost obliterated. The Sicilian cave of Maccagnone is 
a remarkable proof of the accumulation of these bones. There 
is a bony breccia on the bottom of the cavern, and on the 
roof of the cavern is another mass, which is really a part of 
the same breccia as that found on the floor. The whole of 
this cavern must at one time have been filled with this 
breccia, which has since been partially carried away by the 
sea.” 
By the above extract we are reminded that on visiting- 
some of the bone-caverns in the Mendip Hills not long since 
we were particularly struck with the immense numbers of 
the “long bones” therein existing, in association with others, 
of the bear, the hyaena, the deer, and the horse; and what was 
perhaps even more remarkable, the bones appeared not to be 
at all mineralized, and to contain nearly the whole of their 
gelatine. Probably they owe their high state of preservation 
to the debris in which they were imbedded. 
