Page:The Geologist, volume 5.djvu/140

116 and the roof have since been removed by the quarrymen, and transported in the routine of their trade to Ilfracombe or Barnstaple; so that no cave exists there now; and the old earthy floor which contained the bones. . . is covered with soil and fragments of the blasted rock.

"Bones of the following animals were extracted from it:—Mammoth (Elephas primigenius), rhinoceros (Rhinoceros leptorhinus), lion, or tiger (Felis tigris), hyæna (Hyæna spelæa), bear (Ursus spelæus), horse (Equus caballus), ox, deer, wolf, fox—in short, the usual cave osseous remains of extinct, together with bones of pigs, sheep, and other recent animals, some identical with those which still inhabit the district. There also were found bones of fish, and dorsal spines of a species of ray. The elevation of this cave is upwards of 100 feet above the sea, and some of the bones in this collection show the same teeth-marks described by Buckland on those of the Kirkdale caves. Several have been gnawed by larger animals, and some bear marks as of the teeth of a rodent, some rat perhaps.

"The circumstances of this cave in general, and of some of the bones in particular, did not confirm, but rather contradict, the conjecture that it had once been a den of hyænas, by whom they were collected together. Hyænas' bones lay about precisely in the same state as the others. The whole seemed to have been forcibly carried into the cave by the action of water. Some of the bones were wedged into the fissures of the rock at the cave's ends, just as pieces of drift-wood and wreck are observed to be on the shore beneath. Even had the dung of the hyæna been observed here, as in those caves described in the 'Reliquiæ Diluvianæ,' and in Dr. Falconer's report of the ossiferous caverns in Italy, the inference would have been hasty, and probably altogether wrong, that it therefore had been an hyæna's den. The hyæna is by nature a bone- rather than a flesh-eating animal: the dung-balls consequently are almost entirely formed of phosphate of lime, and are so hard that they resist the temporary action of water almost as well as the bones themselves—perhaps, being round, even better. Moreover, if these cave-dwellers, which live in pairs and are not gregarious, follow the habits of canine animals, and of the badgers and foxes which abound still in this part of the kingdom, they would instinctively have sought external, and even distant places. Dogs are notorious for their cleanly habits in respect to their sleeping-places, when they are not chained up; and badgers retire to some place distant from their holes, and to that same place every night, till at length the ground even glitters in the sunshine with the elytra of the beetles, chiefly the Scarabæus stercorarius, which in summer-time forms their principal food, as earth-worms do in the winter.

"The impression of the writer of this notice is, that all these ancient bones were drifted into the cave by the force of water, after they had been gnawed and mumbled outside of it, and that the dung-balls of the hyæna were drifted in with them. Careful observers will have noticed how water-floods collect together into the still places animal remains and light substances at all times.

"We may account for the filling of these caverns in more ways than one. There are in this neighbourhood, and in other parts of England, at this moment, certain holes and natural openings in the earth, particularly where the mountain-limestone lies near the surface, into which rain-torrents discharge themselves, thick with the red mud, and with lighter substances and small stones, which they bear along down the watercourses leading to them. These watercourses formed many of the ancient byeroads and lanes of the country. There is one so situated that has engaged the writer's attention in flood-time for more than twenty years; nor is the