BONES CRUSHED AND POUNDED BY LARGE PEBBLES. 119 
from the roof, and stand high above the surface of the mud and 
broken stalagmite, which is represented as restored at c. From the 
great cave b, we descend by the passage d to the hollow vault e, the 
lower half of wdiich contains beneath a thick crust of stalagmite, an 
accumulation of several feet of mud or sand mixed with bones, and 
extremely large pebbles of transition limestone; the mud and peb¬ 
bles have been separated from each other, and drifted to different 
parts of this vault. The bones which lie in the mud and sand are 
not much broken, and about SO years ago some very entire ones were 
extracted from it, and sent to the Museum at Brunswick; but those 
which occur among the pebbles are more than usually fractured, and 
some of them stamped or pounded, as if in a mortar, into hundreds 
of small splinters, which adhere by stalagmite to the surface of some 
of the largest pebbles: none of them, however, have lost their angles, 
or are in any way rounded; but they are simply broken or crushed 
when in juxta-position to the heavy pebbles, which are more abun¬ 
dant and larger here than in any other part of this, or indeed of any 
cavern I have yet visited. 
It follows from these facts, that the pebbles could not have 
received their actual state of perfect roundness by violent agitation 
of water within the cave itself, as in this case the bones also would 
either have been reduced to pebbles, or totally destroyed; they 
were probably, therefore, rounded before they reached their pre¬ 
sent place, being derived from the limestone rocks of the adjacent 
country, and drifted in by the mouth a and its prolongative m, whilst 
the valley l was in the act of being excavated. Thus introduced, 
they might have passed downwards across the cavern b to the vault e, 
