50 
CHRONOLOGICAL INFERENCES FROM 
lying on the bottom of the cave: and the power of water to introduce 
such sediments is shown by the state of Wokey Hole, and similar 
caverns in the Mendip Hills, and Derbyshire, which are subject to 
be filled with water occasionally by heavy land floods ; the urect ot 
these floods being to leave on the floor a sediment of mud similar to 
that which covers the bones and osseous breccia in the cave of Kirk- 
dale. I have also mentioned that there is no alternation of this mud 
with beds of bone or of stalagmite, such as would have occurred had 
it been produced by land floods often repeated; once, and once only, 
it appears to have been introduced; and we may consider its vehicle 
to have been the turbid waters of the same inundation that produced 
universally the diluvial gravel and loam on the surface without: these 
would enter and fill the cave, and there becoming quiescent, would 
deposit the mud suspended in them (as we see daily silt and warp 
deposited in quiet spots by waters of muddy rivers) along the whole 
bottom of the den, where it has remained undisturbed ever since. 
We cannot refer this mud to a land flood, or succession of land floods, 
partly for the reasons before stated, and partly from the general 
dryness of the cave; had it been liable to be filled with muddy 
water, it would have been so at the time I visited it in December, 
1821, at the end of one of the most rainy seasons ever remembered; 
but even then there were not the slightest symptoms of any such 
occurrence, and a few scanty droppings from the roof were the only 
traces of water entering the area of the cave. 
The 4th period is that during which the stalagmite was deposited 
which invests the upper surface of the mud. The quantity of this 
stalagmite appears to be much greater than that formed in the two 
