150 LOAM AND PEBBLES IN OSSEOUS BRECCIA. 
and has found in the cabinet of Professor Targioni, at Florence, the 
femur of a bear from the osseous breccia of Pisa, and has been informed 
that other similar bones occur in the neighbourhood of Sienna. I 
was still further gratified by M. Cuvier’s showing me specimens from 
several of the places above enumerated, many of which contained 
rolled pebbles, and all of them a large proportion of indurated earthy 
loam, through which, as their matrix, the teeth and fragments of 
bones are disseminated in a manner no way different from that in 
which they occur in the indurated loam at Plymouth and in the 
caves of Germany. This loam is described in many accounts of the 
osseous breccia, as being ochreous stalactite, but this description is 
incorrect; it is a mass of earthy loam, differing only in colour from 
that which fills the caves and fissures, and composes the superficial 
diluvial loam in Germany; and its consolidated state arises from the 
stalagmitic infiltrations that have percolated its pores, and formed 
thin veins and linings of calc sinter in the innumerable crevices and 
small cellular cavities with which it is interspersed. This is precisely 
the state of much of the loam in the caves of Germany ; and in both 
cases the admixture of pebbles with angular fragments of limestone, 
and the irregular manner in which the bones, though evidently not 
rolled, are broken and crowded together in confused heaps, seem to 
indicate that, as I have suggested in my explanation of the bones 
and breccia at Plymouth, they have been moved within the cave or 
fissure by water, to a small distance only from the spot where they 
fell in and died, and simply broken by this removal, but neither 
rounded or reduced to pebbles. The same waters which would thus 
drift them into irregular heaps in the bottom of the caves or fissures 
