he was enfranchised from his bed, and had the entertainment they call walking
about his chamber, and divers friends and acquaintance came and staid with him,
he gathered some little strength. But his levities still continued; and he used to
please himself with rehearsing paltry rhymes and fables, and what with difficulty
of utterance (for his speech was touched and never perfectly recovered) and what
with his unseemly laughing, it was long before he could get any thing well out: and,
at last, he made but broken stuff of it. All this was inexpressible grief and mor-
tification to his friends, seeing that dismal alteration. They had known his genius
bright; and, in his health, solemn, grave, and instructive; and his mirth, when it
happened, not without a flow of pleasant wit, and, as it ought to be, ever decent
and without offence, far from all suspicion of a possibility that such levity of hu-
mour and discourse should ever appear in him. He seemed as a high flying fowl,
with one wing cut. The creature offers to fly, and knows no cause why he should
not, but always comes with a side turn down to the ground. The Doctor had
some remembrances of his former forces, when he could mount up and Ay; now,
his instruments on one side failing him, he was forced to deal in low concerns and
reptile conceits, that scarce rose from the ground.”
We shall add nothing to weaken the effects of a lesson so striking.

Come, man!
Hyperbolized nothing! know thy span;
Take thine own measure here, down, down, and bow
Before thyself in thy idea, thou
Huge emptiness contract thy bulk, and shrink
All thy wild circle to a point !

FROM THE ANNALS OF PHILOSOPHY

Account of an Assemblage of Fossil Teeth and Bones of Elephant, Rhi

noceros, Hippopotamus, Bear, Tiger, and Hyæna, and 16 other Animals; discovered in a Cave at Kirkdale, Yorkshire, in the year 1821: with a Comparative View of five similar Caverns in various Parts of England, and others on the Continent. By the Rev. William Buckland, F.R.S. F.L. S. Vice-President of the Geological Society of London, and Professor of Mineralogy and Geology in the University of Oxford, &c.*

Having been induced in December last to visit Yorkshire, for the purpose of investigating the circumstances of the cave, at Kirkdale, near Kirby Moorside, about 25 miles N. N. E. of the city of York, in which a discovery was made last summer of a singular collection of teeth and bones, I beg to lay before the Royal Society the result of my observations on this new and interesting case, and to point out some important general conclusions that arise from it.

The facts I have collected seem calculated to throw an important light on the state of our planet at a period antecedent to the last great convulsion that has affected its surface; and I may add, in limine, that they afford one of the most complete and satisfactory chains of consistent circumstantial evidence I have ever met with in the course of my geological investigations.

As I shall have frequent occasion to make use of the word diluvium, it may be necessary to premise that I apply it to those extensive and general deposits of superficial gravel, which appear to have been produced by the last great convulsion that has affected our planet; and that with regard to the indications afforded by geology of such a convulsion, I entirely coincide with the views of M. Cuvier, in considering them as bearing undeniable evidence of a recent and transient inundation.* On these grounds I have felt myself fully justified in applying the epithet diluvial to the results of this great convulsion, of antediluvial to the state of things immediately preceding it, and postdiluvial or alluvial to that which succeeded it, and has continued to the present time.

In detailing these observations, I propose, first, to submit a short account of the geological position and relations of the rock in which the cavern alluded to is situated; to proceed, in the next place, to a description of the cavern itself; then to enter into that which will form the most important part of this communication, a particular enumeration of the animal remains there inhumed, and the very remarkable phenomena with which they are attended; to review the general inferences to which these phenomena lead; and conclude with a brief comparative account of analogous animal deposits in other parts of this country, and the Continent.

Kirkdale is situated about 25 miles N. N. E. of the city of York, between Helmsley and Kirby Moorside, near the point at which the east base of the Hambleton bills, looking towards Scarborough, subsides into the vale of Pickering, and on the S. extremity of the mountainous district known by the name of the Eastern and the Cleveland Moorlands.

The substratum of this valley of Pickering is a mass of stratified blue clay, identical with that which at Oxford and Weymouth reposes on a similar limestone to that of Kirkdale, and containing subordinately beds of inflammable bituminous shale, like that of Kimeridge in Dorsetshire. Its south boundary is formed by the Howardian hills, and by the elevated escarpment of the chalk that terminates the Wolds towards Scarborough. Its north frontier is composed of a belt of limestone, extending eastward 30 miles from the Hambleton hills, near Helmsley, to the sea at Scarborough, and varying in breadth from four to seven miles; this limestone is intersected by a succession of deep and parallel valleys, (here called dales) through which the following rivers from the moorlands pass down southwards to the vale of Pickering, viz. the Rye, the Rical, the Hodge Beck, the Dove, the Seven Beck, and the Costa; their united streams fall into the Derwent above New Malton, and their only outlet is by a deep gorge, extending from near this town down to Kirkham, the stoppage of which would at once convert the whole vale of Pickering into an immense inland lake; and before the excavation of which, it is probable, that such a lake existed, having its north border nearly along the edge of the belt of limestone just described, and at no great distance from the mouth of the cave at Kirkdale.

Analogous evidences to the same point, collected in this country from the state of the gravel beds and valleys in the midland parts of England, have recently been published by myself in a paper on the Lickey Hill, in the second part of the fifth volume of the Geological Transactions, and in the appendix to an inaugural lecture I published at Oxford, in 1820. Another paper of mine on similar evidences afforr'ed by the valleys that intersect the coast of West Dorset and E. st Devorshire, will be published in the first part of the sixth volume of the Geological Trans-, actions.

a

The position of the cave is at the south and lower extremity of one of these dales (that of the Rical Beck), at the point where it falls into the vale of Pickering, at the distance of about a furlong from the church of Kirkdale, and near the brow of the left flank of the valley, close to the road. This Hank slopes towards the river at an angle of 25°, and the height of the brow of the slope above the water may be about 120 feet.

The rock perforated by the cave is referrible to that portion of the oolite formation which, in the south of England, is known by the name of Oxford oolite and coral rag: its organic remains are identical with those of the Heddington quarries near Oxford, but its substance is harder and more compact, and more interspersed with siliceous matter, forming irregular concretions, beds, and nodules of chert in the limestone, and sometimes entirely penetrating its coralline remains. The most compact beds of this limestone resemble the younger alpine limestone of Meillierie and Aigle, in Switzerland, and they alternate with, and pass gradually into, those of a coarser oolitic texture; and both varieties are stratified in beds from one to four feet thick. The cave is situated in one of the compact beds which lies between two others of the coarser oolitic variety; the latter vary in colour from light-yellow to blue; the compact beds are of a dark grey passing to black, are extremely fetid, and full of corals and spines of the echinus cidaris. The compact portions of this oolite partake of the property common to compact limestones of all ages and formations, of being perforated by irregular holes and caverns intersecting them in all directions; the cause of these cavities has never been satisfactorily ascertained : into this question (which is one of considerable difficulty in geology) it is foreign to my present purpose to inquire any further than to state that they were neither produced, enlarged, or diminished by the presence of the animals whose bones we now find in them.

The abundance of such caverns in the limestone of the vicinity of Kirkdale is evident from the fact of the engulphment of several of the rivers above enumerated in the course of their passage across it from the eastern moorlands to the vale of Pickering; and it is important to observe that the elevation of the Kirkdale cave, above the bed of the Hodge Beck, exceeding 100 feet, excludes the possibility of our attributing the muddy sediment we shall find it to contain, to any land flood or extraordinary rise of the waters of that or any other now existing river.

It was not till the summer of 1821 that the existence of any animal remains, or of the cavern containing them, had been suspected. At this time, in continuing the operations of a large quarry along the brow of the slope just mentioned, the workmen accidentally intersected the mouth of a long hole or cavern, closed externally with rubbish, and overgrown with grass and bushes. As this rubbish was removed before any competent person had examined it, it is not certain whether it was composed of diluvial gravel and rolled pebbles, or was simply the debris that had fallen from the softer portions of the strata that lay above it; the workmen, however, who removed it, and some gentlemen who saw it, assured me, that it was composed of gravel and sand. In the interior of the cave there was not a single rolled pebble, nor one bone, or fragment of bone, that bears the slightest mark of having been rolled by the action of water. A few bits of limestone and roundish concretions of chert that had fallen from the roof and sides, were the only rocky fragments that occurred, with the exception of stalactite.

About 30 feet of the outer extremity of the cave have now been removed, and the present entrance is a hole in the perpendicular face of the quarry less than five feet square, which it is only possible for a man to enter on his hands and knees, and which expands and contracts itself irregularly from two to seven feet in breadth and height, diminishing, however, as it proceeds into the interior of the hill. The cave is about 15 or 20 feet below the incumbent field, the surface of which is nearly level, and parallel to the stratification of the limestone, and to the bottom of the cave. Its main direction is E.S. E. but deviating from a straight line by several zigzags to the right and left; its greatest length is from 150 to 200 feet. In its interior it divides into several smaller passages, the extent of which has not been ascertained. In its course it is intersected by some vertical fissures, one of which is curvilinear, and again returns to the cave; another has never been traced to its termination; while the outer extremity of a third is probably seen in a crevice or fissure that appears on the face of the quarry, and which closes upwards before it leaves the body of the limestone. By removing the sediment and stalactite that now obstruct the smaller passages, a further advance in them may be rendered practicable. The half corroded fragments of corals, of spines of echini and other organic remains, and the curious ledges of limestone and nodules of chert that project along the sides and roof of the cave, together with the small grooves and pits that cover great part of its interior, show that there was a time when its dimensions were less than at present; though they fail to prove by what cause it was originally produced. There are but two or three places in which it is possible to stand upright, and these are where the cavern is intersected by the fissures; the latter of which continue open upwards to the height only of a few feet, when they gradually close, and terminate in the body of the limestone: they are thickly lined with stalactite, and are attended by no fault or slip of either of their sides. Both the roof and floor, for many yards from the entrance, are composed of horizontal strata of limestone, uninterrupted by the slightest appearance of fissure, fracture, or stony rubbish of any kind; but further in, the roof and sides become irregularly arched, presenting a very rugged and grotesque appearance, and being studded with pendent and roundish masses of chert and stalactite; the bottom of the cavern is visible only near the entrance; and its irregularities, though apparently not great, have been filled up throughout to a nearly level surface, by the introduction of a bed of mud or sediment, the history of which, and also of the stalactite, I shall presently describe.

The fact already mentioned of the engulphment of the Rical Beck, and other adjacent rivers, as they cross the limestone, showing it to abound with many similar cavities to those at Kirkdale, renders įt likely that hereafter similar deposits of bones may be discovered in this same neighbourhood; but accident alone can lead to such discovery, as it is probable the mouths of these caverns are buried under diluvian sand and gravel, or postdiluvian detritus; so that nothing but their casual intersection by some artificial operations will lead to the knowledge of their existence; and in this circumstance we also

see a reason why so few caverns of this kind have hitherto been discovered, although it is probable that many such may exist.

In all these cases, the bones found in caverns are never mineralised, but simply in the state of grave bones, or incrusted by stalactite ; and have no further connexion with the rocks themselves than that arising from the accident of having been lodged in their cavities at periods long subsequent to the formation and consolidation of the strata in which these cavities occur.

On entering the cave at Kirkdale, the first thing we observe is a sediment of mud, covering entirely its whole bottom to the average depth of about a foot, and entirely covering and concealing the subjacent rock, or actual floor of the cavern. Not a particle of mud is found attached either to the sides or roof; nor is there a trace of it adhering to the sides or upper portions of the transverse fissures, or any thing to suggest the idea that it entered through them. The surface of this sediment, when the cave was first entered, was nearly smooth and level, except in those parts where its regularity had been broken by the accumulation of stalagmite above it, or ruffled by the dripping of water: its substance is argillaceous and slightly micaceous loam, composed of such minute particles as would easily be suspended in muddy water, and mixed with much calcareous matter, that seems to have been derived in part from the dripping of the roof, and in part from comminuted bones.

Above this mud, on advancing some way into the cave, the roof and sides are seen to be partially studded and cased over with a coating of stalactite, which is most abundant in those parts where the transverse fissures occur, but in small quantity where the rock is compact and devoid of fissures. Thus far it resembles the stalactite of ordinary caverns; but on tracing it downwards to the surface of the mud, it was there found to turn off at right angles from the sides of the cave, and form above the mud a plate or crust, shooting across like ice on the surface of water, or cream on a pan of milk. The thickness and quantity of this crust varied with that found on the roof and sides, being most abundant, and covering the mud entirely where there was much stalactite on the sides, and more scanty in those places where the roof presented but little: in many parts it was totally wanting both on the roof and surface of the mud and subjacent floor. Great portion of this crust had been destroyed in digging up the mud to extract the bones; it still remained, however, projecting partially in some few places along the sides ; and in one or two, where it was very thick, it formed,

when I visited the cave, a continuous bridge over the mud entirely across from one side to the other. In the outer portion of the cave, there was a mass of this kind which had been accumulated so high as to obstruct the passage, so that a man could not enter till it had been dug away.

These horizontal incrustations have been formed by the water which, trickling down the sides, was forced to ooze off laterally as soon as it came into contact with the mud; in other parts, where it fell in drops from the roof, stalagmitic accumulations have been raised on its surface, some of which are very large, but more commonly they are of the size and shape of a cow's pap, a name which the workman have applied to them. "There is no alteration of mud with any repeated beds of stalactite, but simply a partial deposit of the latter on the floor Vol. I. No. 3.-Museum.

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