144 
NEWER PLIOCENE PERIOD. 
[Ch. XT. 
Kaola, and Phalangista, have been recognized. The greater 
part of them belong to existing, but several to extinct, species. 
One of the bones is of much greater size than the rest, and is 
supposed, by Mr. Clift, to belong to an hippopotamus *. 
In a collection of these bones sent to Paris, Mr. Pentland 
thought he could recognize a species of Halmaturus of larger 
size than the largest living kangaroo j. 
These facts are full of interest, for they prove that the 
peculiar type of organization which now characterizes the 
marsupial tribes has prevailed from a remote period in Aus- 
tralia, and that in that continent, as in Europe, North and South 
America, and India, many species of mammalia have become 
extinct. It also appears, although the evidence is less com- 
plete than we could have wished, that land quadrupeds, far 
exceeding in magnitude the wild species now inhabiting New 
Holland, have, at some former period, existed in that country. 
Breccias noiv forming in the Morea. — Respecting the various 
ways in which fissures and caverns may become gradually filled 
up with osseous breccias, we may refer the reader to what we 
have said in a former volume %. It appears, however, from a 
recent communication of M. Boblaye, that the Morea is, of all 
the countries hitherto investigated, that which throws, the great- 
est light on the mode in which the Mediterranean breccias may 
have originated. 
In that peninsula a great many of the rivers and torrents 
terminate in land-locked hollows, where they are engulphed in 
chasms which traverse limestone. They sometimes 'reappear 
at great distances, but generally they discharge their waters 
below the level of the sea. c Numerous bone caverns,' says 
M. Boblaye, » may thus be filling up in our own times, and 
the gulphs (katavothrons) of the plain of Tripolitza have 
swallowed up of late years thousands of human bones, mingled 
* Mr. Clift, Ed. New Phil. Journ., No. xx. p. 394.— Major Mitchell, Proceed- 
ings of Geol. Soc, 1831, p. 321. 
f Journ. de Geologie, tome iii. p. 291. The bone of an elephant mentioned by 
Mr. Pentland was the same large bone alluded to by Mr. Clift. 
J Vol. ii. chap. xiii. 
