Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/192

174 Durdham Down, Minchin Hole, and other Grower caverns—also found at Clacton, in Essex, and in Northamptonshire.

3. R. etruscus Falconer, a comparatively slight and slender form, also with an incomplete bony septum, occurs deep in the Val d'Arno deposits, and in the 'Forest bed,' and superimposed blue clays, with lignite, of the Norfolk coast, but nowhere as yet found in the ossiferous caves in Britain.

Dr. Falconer announced in 1859 his opinion that the filling up of the Gower caves in South Wales took place after the deposition of the marine boulder clay, an opinion in harmony with what we have since learnt from the section of the gravels near Bedford, given above at p. 155, where a fauna corresponding to that of the Welsh caves characterises the ancient alluvium, and is shown to be clearly post-glacial, in the sense of being posterior in date to the submergence of the midland counties beneath the waters of the glacial sea. The Gower caves in general have their floors strewed over with sand, containing marine shells, all of living species; and there are raised beaches on the adjoining coast, and other geological signs of great alteration in the relative level of land and sea, since that country was inhabited by the extinct mammalia, some of which, as we have seen, were certainly coeval with man.

Geologists have long been familiar with the fact that on the northern coast of Sicily, between Termini on the east, and Trapani on the west, there are many caves containing the bones of extinct animals. These caves are situated in rocks of hippurite limestone, a member of the cretaceous series, and some of them may be seen on both sides of the Bay of