Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/194

176 materials reaching to the roof, and evidently washed in from above, through crevices in the limestone. In this upper and newer breccia Dr. Falconer discovered flint knives, bone splinters, bits of charcoal, burnt clay, and other objects indicating human intervention, mingled with entire land shells, teeth of horses, coprolites of hyænas, and other bones, the whole agglutinated to one another and to the roof by the infiltration of water holding lime in solution. The perfect condition of the large fragile helices (Helix vermiculata) afforded satisfactory evidence, says Dr. Falconer, that the various articles were carried into the cave by the tranquil agency of water, and not by any tumultuous action. At a subsequent period other geographical changes took place, so that the cave, after it had been filled, was washed out again, or emptied of its contents with the exception of those patches of breccia which, being cemented together by stalactite, still adhere to the roof.

Baron Anca, following up these investigations, explored, in 1859, another cave at Mondello, west of Palermo, and north of Mount Gallo, where he discovered molars of the living African elephant, and afterwards additional specimens of the same species in the neighbouring grotto of Olivella, In reference to this elephant, Dr. Falconer has reminded us that the distance between the nearest part of Sicily and the coast of Africa, between Marsala and Cape Bon, is not more than eighty miles, and Admiral Smyth, in his Memoir on the Mediterranean, states (p. 499) that there is a subaqueous plateau, named by him Adventure Bank, uniting Sicily to Africa by a succession of ridges which are not more than from forty to fifty fathoms under water. Sicily therefore might be re-united to Africa by movements of upheaval not