BONES IN FISSURES AND CAVES COEVAL—MAJOR IMRIE. 153 
in two distinct states, one forming a very hard indurated breccia, the 
cement of which varies from a brown colour to almost black; in the 
other, they are loose, or feebly agglutinated, by means of calcareous 
infiltrations, with fragments of limestone and sea shells He adds, 
there appear to be several fissures, some containing a few dispersed 
fragments of bone, and others of loose earth and stones. 
All these arguments are still further corroborated by the state of 
preservation of the Gibraltar bones, being exactly that of the bears 
bones, which occur in the osseous breccia of the caves of Gailenreuth, 
&c.; they are white, dry, and adherent to the tongue, different from 
and indicating a much higher antiquity than the postdiluvian bones 
that occur above the stalagmite crust within the German caves, or in 
the open fissure at Duncombe Park. 
But the fact of the breccia of Gibraltar (and by consequence those 
of Nice, Cette, Dalmatia, and the other places before enumerated) 
being coeval with that of the caverns we have been describing, is, I 
think, established beyond all doubt by the minute and careful account 
we have of it in Major Imrie’s Mineralogical Description of Gibraltar, 
in the 4th vol. of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 
which is so important, that I shall here extract those parts of it which 
bear on the point before us“ The insulated mountain, or rock of 
Gibraltar, says he, “ is composed of compact limestone, rising at its 
greatest elevation 1439 feet above the level of the sea, being about 
three miles long, and three quarters of a mile broad in its widest part, 
' This occurrence of marine shells in the looser variety of breccia may possibly be 
attributed to their having been collected by sea birds or by men, as in the case of the 
cave of Paviland. 
