GROTTOES OF LUNEL AND OISELLES.

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caves, M. Goldfuss observed a stratum of it covering the names of MM. Esper and Rosenmüller, inscribed at their visit only thirty years before.

In March 1826, Dr. Buckland visited the bone cave of Lunel near Montpellier, situated in compact calcaire grossier. In working a freestone, the side of the cavern was accidentally laid open, and considerable excavations have since been made in it, at the expense of the French government, for the purpose of extracting its animal remains that lie buried in mud and gravel. A rectangular vault has thus been exposed, nearly 100 yards in length, and from 10 to 12 in width and height.

Many of the bones bear marks of being gnawed by the teeth of ossivorous animals; and there is an extraordinary abundance of balls of album græcum in the highest state of preservation.

M. Marcel de Serres has published a list of the animal remains contained in this cavern, which differ but little from those of Kirkdale; the most remarkable addition being that of the beaver and the badger, together with the smaller-striped, or Abyssinian hyæna.

In Oct. following, the Dr. visited also the grotto of Oiselles near Besançon, in France, for the purpose of applying to it, the method of investigation which his experience in other caverns had taught him to adopt with success in the pursuit of fossil bones. This grotto is of vast extent, nearly a quarter of a mile in length, and made up of a succession of more than thirty vaults or chambers, connected together by narrow passages, and running almost horizontally into the body of a mountain of

Jura limestone, on the left bank of the Doubs near Besançon.

The only entrance to the grotto is by an irregular aperture about the size of a common door, in the slope of the hill about 60 feet from the river. The abundance and beauty of the stalactite in many parts of this cavern, have rendered it one of the most celebrated and most frequented in France; but before Dr. Buckland, no one had ever sought for bones beneath the crust of stalagmite, which in most of the chambers covers the floor.

On breaking for the first time through the stalagmite, the guides were much surprised to find the Doctor's prediction verified, as to the existence of a thick bed of mud and pebbles, beneath what they had considered to be the impenetrable pavement of the cave, and still more so, to see that in every one of the only four places which he selected for investigation, this diluvium was abundantly loaded with the teeth and bones of fossil bears. These lay scattered through the mud and gravel, in the same irregular manner as the bones of bears lie in the caves of Franconia and the Hartz, and are, like them, the remains of animals that lived and died in these caverns, before the introduction of the diluvium. They were found nowhere in entire skeletons, but dispersed confusedly through the mud. They were from bears of all ages, and none bore marks of either having been rolled by water, or gnawed by the teeth of hyænas. Of this last named animal, Dr. Buckland found no traces in this cave, in the few spots which he examined. He says the best rule to follow in pursuit of antedi

GROTTO OF OISELLES, A HYÆNA DEN. 577

luvian remains in caverns, is to select the lowest parts in which any diluvium can have accumulated, and there dig through the stalagmitic crust, and seek for teeth and bones in the mud and pebbles that lie below. Their antiquity may also be tested by their property of adhering to the tongue (happer) in consequence of their loss of gelatine, without the substitution of mineral matter; a property which the bones found in the Roman graves and Druidical tombs of England do not possess.

This cave has been since explored by the French naturalists, and a report made of some of its contents by Baron Cuvier to the Academy of Sciences. The bones in one of its chambers belong entirely to the cavern bear, ursus spelaus, without intermixture of any other animal remains whatsoever. In some adjoining chambers, hyæna bones have been found, along with those of tigers, and other carnivora, with a few bears' bones. In other caverns, which contain many hyænas' bones, those of herbivorous animals occur more numerously, all marked as at Kirkdale with gnawed prints of the hyænas? teeth. M. Cuvier concurs with the Doctor in thinking that these excavations were hyænas' dens, in which the last of these animals were drowned by a diluvial inundation, which has choked up the mouths of the caves with gravel and clay. The grotto of Oiselles lies at the foot of the Jura mountains, and consists of a great many separate chambers of considerable dimensions.-Annales de Chim. et de Phys. Oct. 1827.

A bone cave called Kent's Hole near Torquay

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in carboniferous limestone, discovered lately, has brought unequivocal confirmation to Doctor Buckland's theory of the Kirkdale phenomena. The condition of the hyænas' teeth, the number and variety of animals, and the circumstances that accompany their mangled remains, are precisely the same in both dens; the only difference being that the Torquay cave is twenty times more extensive than the Yorkshire one; and the animal exuviæ in like proportion. The superficial crust of stalagmite, and the bed of mud which forms the matrix of the broken bones and teeth beneath it are also proportionately thicker. There is also album græcum excrement, as at Kirkdale, and stumps of gnawed horns of deer; and the bony bases of horns of rhinoceroses, but no horns of this animal, although more than a hundred of its teeth have been already found; along with the teeth of many infant elephants, numberless bones of horses, elks, deer, and oxen, gnawed bones, and jaws of hyænas, with their single teeth and tusks; the teeth and tusks of bears, tigers, wolves, and foxes; and of an unknown carnivorous animal, as large at least as a tiger, the genus of which has not yet been determined.

Of more than a thousand bones, or rather fragments of bones, that have been collected in Kent's Hole, not fifty have been found entire, the extremities and condyles of the cylindrical bones having been gnawed off, before they were imbedded, along with the accompanying splinters and teeth, in the mud and gravel conglomerate of the cave. The softer portions of the bones are invariably removed, and

IMMENSE EXCAVATION OF KÜHLOCH.

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marks of gnawing and fracture impressed, such as the living hyænas, at Exeter Change, are known to make on the ox bones on which they feed.

Doctor Buckland considers the cave of Kühloch, as more remarkable than all the rest in the neighbourhood of Rabenstein, and indeed the only one he has ever seen except that of Kirkdale, in which the animal remains have escaped disturbance by diluvian action. The interior of Kühloch has the capacity of a large church. Its floor is covered, to an average depth of 6 feet with black animal dust, constituting altogether a mass exceeding 5000 cubic feet, with broken fragments of bones interspersed. That black earth seems to be pulverised bone, in a dry state, rising in powder under the feet, and is used by the peasants as a fertilising manure. Dr. Buckland computes on reasonable grounds that in the single vault of Kühloch the remains of at least 2500 bears are accumulated, a number which may have been supplied in the space of 1000 years, by a mortality at the rate of two and a half per annum. For some other judicious speculations on the singularities exhibited by this cave, the Reliquiæ Diluviana may be consulted, p. 138.

In the same instructive work, several additional localities are mentioned of bone-caverns in England. The cave of Hutton, a village in the county of Somerset, at the foot of the Mendip hills, contained bones of elephants, horses, wild boars, two species of stags, oxen, a skeleton almost entire of a fox, and the metacarpal bone of a great bear.

The cave of Derdham Down, near Clifton, hard by Bristol, afforded bones of the horse.