oil, _it is not credible
that all the solid shed antlers of such species of deer could be carried
by the same cause to the same distance_; or that any of them could be
rolled for a short distance, with other heavy debris of a mighty
torrent, without fracture and signs of friction. But the shed antlers of
the large extinct species of deer found in this island and in Ireland
have commonly their parts or branches entire as when they fell; and the
fractured specimens are generally found in caves, and _show marks of the
teeth of the ossivorous hyaenas_ by which they had been gnawed; thus at
the same time revealing the mode in which they were introduced into
those caves, and _proving the contemporaneous existence in this island
of both kinds of mammalia_."

[Illustration: Fig. 111.

MEGACEROS HIBERNICUS.

(_Irish Elk._)]

But the contents of the bone caves, consisting in large part of the
extinct mammals, ought of themselves to be decisive in this question. As
the opening of the Kirkdale cavern is only about four feet each way, a
diluvial wave, charged with the wreck of the lower latitudes, could
scarce have washed into such an orifice any considerable number of the
intertropical animals. And yet there has been found in this cave,--with
the teeth of a very young mammoth, of a very great tiger, of a
tiger-like animal whose genus is extinct, of a rhinoceros, and of a
hippopotamus,--the fragmentary remains of from two to three hundred
hyaenas. Further, even supposing, what is impossible, that a diluvial
wave had swept them all from the tropics into the four-feet hole, on
what principle is it to be explained that the bones thus washed into the
cave should be all gnawed bones, even those of the hyaenas themselves,
whereas the bones of the same creatures found in the mammaliferous
deposits of the country bear no marks of teeth? Mr. Granville Penn,
however, gets over the difficulty of the cave, which is hollowed, I may
mention, in a limestone of the Oolitic series, inclosing the ammonite
and belemnite, by asserting that its mammaliferous contents may be
_somewhat older than itself_! The limestone existed, he holds, as but a
mere unformed pulp at the time the intertropical animals came floating
northwards: they sank into it; the gasses evolved during putrefaction
blew up the plastic lime above them into a great oblong bubble,
somewhat as a glass-blower blows up a bottle; and hence the Kirkdale
cavern, with its gnawed bones and i