DISCOVERED AT RIRKDALE, IN YORKSHIRE. 
39 
rise of these, had there been any hyaenas in the den, they would have 
rushed out, and fled for safety to the hills; and if absent, they could 
by no possibility have returned to it from the higher levels: that they 
were extirpated by this catastrophe is obvious, from the discovery of 
their bones in the diluvial gravel both of England and Germany. 
The same circumstance will also explain the reason why there are no 
heaps of bones found on the outside of the Ivirkdale cave, as described 
by Busbequius on the outside of the hyaenas’ dens in Anatolia; for 
every thing that lay without, on the antediluvian surface, must have 
been swept far away, and scattered by the violence of the diluvian 
waters; and there is no reason for believing that hyaenas, or any 
other animals whatever, have occupied the den subsequently to that 
catastrophe*. 
Although the evidence to prove the cave to have been inhabited 
as a den by successive generations of hymn as appears thus direct, it 
may be as well to consider what other hypotheses can be suggested, 
to explain the collection of bones assembled in it. 
1st. It may be said, that the various animals had entered the cave 
spontaneously to die, or had fled into it as a refuge from some general 
convulsion: but the diameter of the cave, as has been mentioned 
before, compared with the bulk of the elephant and rhinoceros, 
renders this solution impossible as to the larger animals; and with 
* It has been suggested further, that there is no proof that this individual cave was 
actually occupied at the precise point of time at which the waters began to rise, although 
it certainly had been so during several generations not long preceding. It may have 
been abandoned a short time prior to it, and at that moment have been untenanted; for 
modern hunters do not always find their game exactly on the same spot, nor is there any 
thing to prevent hyaenas as well as other wild animals from occasionally changing their 
quarters. Quarterly Review, Oct. 1822, p. 468. 
