BONES AT ORESTON. 
73 
The bones appeared to us to have been washed down from above 
at the same time with the mud and fragments of limestone, through 
which they are dispersed, and to have been lodged wherever there 
was a ledge or cavity sufficiently capacious to receive them, or a strait 
sufficiently narrow to be completely obstructed by them; they were 
entirely without order, and not in entire skeletons; occasionally frac¬ 
tured, but not rolled; apparently drifted, but to a short distance from 
the spot in which the animals died; they seem to agree in all their 
circumstances with the osseous breccia of Gibraltar, excepting the 
accident of their being less firmly cemented by stalagmitic infiltra¬ 
tions through their earthy matrix, and consequently being more de¬ 
cayed ; they do not appear, like those at Kirkdale, to bear marks of 
having been gnawed or fractured by the teeth of hyaenas, nor is there 
any reason to believe them to have been introduced by the agency 
of these animals. 
The only marks I have seen on them were those pointed out to 
me by Mr. Clift, of nibbling by the incisor and canine teeth of an 
animal of the size of a weasel, showing distinctly the different effect 
of each individual tooth on the ulna of a wolf, and the tibia of a horse; 
and a few pits or circular cavities produced by partial decomposition 
on one surface only of the tibia of an ox, exactly resembling those 
which occur on many of the bones from the cave at Kirkdale. 
These pits must have been formed before the bone was imbedded 
tion made by Mr. Cottle : in that sent to the College of Surgeons those of the ox were 
much more numerous, being nearly equal to those of the horse; but whatever be the 
disproportion of their numbers, the bones and teeth of all the animals are found con¬ 
fusedly mixed together in irregular heaps, and not in entire skeletons, nor arranged in 
different parts of the cavern according to the difference of their species. 
