Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/394

368 4th. An almost black layer, about four inches thick, composed mainly of small fragments of charred wood, and distinguished as the black band, occupied an area of about 100 square feet, immediately under tire granular stalagmite, and, at the nearest point, not more than thirty-two feet from one of the entrances to the cavern. Nothing of the kind has occurred elsewhere.

5th. Immediately under the granular stalagmite and the black band lay a light red clay, containing usually about 50 per cent, of small angular fragments of limestone, and somewhat numerous blocks of the same rock as large as those lying on the black mould. In this deposit, known as the cave-earth, many of the stones and bones were, at all depths, invested with thin stalagmitic films. The cave-earth was of unknown depth near the entrances, where its base had never been reached; but in the remoter parts of the cavern it did not usually exceed a foot, and in a few localities it "thinned out" entirely.

6lh. Beneath the cave-earth there was usually found a floor of stalagmite having a crystalline texture, and termed on that account the crystalline stalagmite. It was commonly thicker than the granular floor, and in one instance but little short of 12 feet.

7th. Below the whole occurred, so far as is at present known, the oldest of the cavern deposits. It was composed of subangular and rounded pieces of dark-red grit, embedded in a sandy paste of the same colour. Small angular fragments of limestone, and investing films of stalagmite, both prevalent in the cave-earth, were extremely rare. Large blocks of limestone were occasionally met with; and the deposit, to which the name of breccia were given, was of a depth exceeding that to which the exploration has yet been carried.

Except in a very few small branches, the bottom of the cavern has nowhere been reached. In the cases in which there was no cave-earth, the granular stalagmite rested immediately on the crystalline; and where the crystalline stalagmite was not present the cave-earth and breccia were in direct contact. Large isolated masses of the crystalline stalagmite, as well as concreted lumps of the breccia, were occasionally met with in the cave-earth, thus showing that the older deposits had, in portions of the cavern, been partially broken up, dislodged, and re-deposited. No instance was met with of the incorporation in a lower bed of fragments derived from an upper one. In short, wherever all the deposits were found in one and the same vertical section, the order of superposition