42 
account of fossil teeth and bones 
that lay long uncovered at the bottom of the den have undergone a 
decay proportionate to the time of their exposure; others, that have 
lain only a short time before the introduction of the diluvian mud, 
have been preserved by it almost from even incipient decomposition. 
Thus the phenomena of this cave seem referable to a period im¬ 
mediately antecedent to the last inundation of the earth, and in which 
the world was inhabited by land animals, almost all bearing a generic 
and many a specific resemblance to those which now exist; but so com¬ 
pletely has the violence of that tremendous convulsion destroyed and 
remodelled the form of the antediluvian surface, that it is only in 
caverns that have been protected from its ravages that we may hope 
to find undisturbed evidence of events in the period immediately 
preceding it. The bones already described, and the stalagmite formed 
before the introduction of the diluvial mud, are what I consider to be 
the products of the period in question. It was indeed probable, before 
the discovery of this cave, from the abundance in which the remains 
of similar species occur in superficial gravel beds, which cannot be re¬ 
ferred to any other than a diluvial origin, that such animals were the 
antediluvian inhabitants not only of this country, but generally of 
all those northern latitudes in which their remains are found (but 
the proof was imperfect, as it was possible they might have been 
drifted or floated hither by the waters from the warmer regions of 
the earth); but the facts developed in this charnel-house of the ante¬ 
diluvian forests of Yorkshire demonstrate that there was a long suc¬ 
cession of years in which the elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus 
had been the prey of the hyaenas, which, like themselves, inhabited 
England in the period immediately preceding the formation of the 
diluvial gravel; and if they inhabited this country, it follows as a 
