470 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
that these had become closed since the entombment of the remains ; 
and finding a quantity of detrital matter in the caves — clay, sand, 
limestone, gravel — concluded that the bones had been washed 
down therewith, and " lodged wherever there was a ledge or 
cavity, sufficiently capacious to receive them, or a straight suffi- 
ciently narrow to be completely obstructed by them ; they were 
entirely without order and not in entire skeletons, occasionally 
fractured but not rolled, apparently drifted but to a short distance 
from the spot on which the animals died." Buckland's final hypo- 
thesis was that the animals had fallen during the antediluvian 
period into open fissures, and there perishing had remained undis- 
turbed until the waters of the deluge drifted their remains to the 
position in which they were found. With his first suggestion I 
generally agree ; from the latter I dissent. Geologists of the pre- 
sent day do not call a special deluge to their aid. It was far other- 
wise however once; since a little after Buckland writes, we find 
Mr. Joseph Cottle declaring, "No one phenomenon presents a 
fuller attestation of that overwhelming catastrophe [the Deluge] 
than the innumerable animal remains discovered in the Oreston 
Caves." 
We owe to Mr. Pengelly the most exact account of the recent 
cave phenomena which we possess. Yisiting Oreston in 1859, in 
consequence of the renewed discoveries of the previous year, he 
ascertained that the new cave was in the same line as the old 
ones, which had been long entirely removed, "as if the various 
caverns had been so many enlarged portions of one and the same 
original line of fracture." Moreover he found that such portion of 
the roof of the cavern as remained was a "mass of limestone 
breccia made up of large angular fragments cemented with car- 
bonate of lime, and easily enough mistaken without careful in- 
spection for ordinary limestone, somewhat rich in coarse veins." 
This was what some of the older investigators had taken for an 
unbroken stratum of solid rock. Having thus established the 
original open character of the fissure, Mr. Pengelly declined to say 
"whether animals fell or were dragged in, or whether the bones 
found there were wholly or partially the remains of dead animals 
washed in Some of the bones appear to have been rolled 
as if they had been washed in, whilst if as Sir Henry De la Beche 
supposed the loam or clay is really impregnated with animal 
matter, it seems reasonable to infer that at least in some cases, 
