Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 31.djvu/334

244 bones very rotten and difficult to get out entire. Lower down, the bones were much better-preserved. Lowest of all, near to the encircling rocks, the bones were incrusted with stalagmite, and sometimes welded together into a mass by it. This was particularly the case in the fissure and near the walls of the basin; further from the rock no such bones appeared.

This stalagmite confirms my opinion that the place was filled from the subaerial disintegration of the limestone alone, as it could only have arisen from water dripping from the rocks above and charged with carbonate of lime. The limestone rises just to the south; and thus water would flow down from it towards the "swallows" near the fissure. Near to the subjacent rock was yellowish earth (E, fig. 2), similar to that lying next to the rock all over the Mountain-Limestone district.

The period necessary for the filling-up of the basin and fissure with the debris and the included bones must have been of considerable duration. It is, of course, clear that the bones incrusted with or enclosed in stalagmite must have lain exposed for a considerable time; and the loam itself had no appearance of being washed or drifted into the fissure except very gradually, and then being rather the result of the disintegration of the rocks immediately around than from the washings of any rocks further away. All the included rocks were limestone and angular, and bore no signs of rolling; they must have fallen from time to time from the rock round the basin. Some were of large size. Certainly, if any of the fragments had been washed in, they and the loam including them must have come from the slopes to the south of the place, as there is nothing but the Yoredale series to the north.

At the same time floods may have from time to time occurred, and conveyed bones and débris into the basin.

The likeliest supposition appears to me to be that this was a swampy place, into which animals from time to time fell, or near which they died, and into which in rainy seasons their bones were washed from the neighbouring slopes.

As to the condition of the bones, some were found in the proper relative position; but most were disjointed and had evidently been disturbed since death; many were fractured, some probably by the falling of pieces of rock; others were so decayed as to be very fragmentary; and many it was impossible to extract whole.

Notwithstanding the fractures, there was no trace (except as will be specially mentioned by Mr. Dawkins) of the gnawing of hyænas or the agency of man.

There is in Staffordshire, near the road from Leek to Ashbourne, at a little village called Waterhouses, a quarry in the Mountain Limestone famous for a discovery of mammoth-remains which took place in 1864. The little river Hamps flows close to the quarry, but, just before reaching it, disappears underground, leaving its ancient bed dry save in very rainy seasons, just as the Manifold