dug up, or had only been told by some person that they were found at some former time. As to the question about their having been found at Blair-Drummond, I can only answer with safety, in the terms of a verdict peculiar to our criminal courts, Not Proven."

The evidence then before us amounts to nothing more than this, that there exist two horns of a rhinoceros, which at some unknown former time were found in some unknown place, by some unknown person, and preserved in some unknown room in the mansion of Blair-Drummond, from which they have since been removed to Edinburgh: Until, therefore, the bones or teeth of these animals shall be found in the moss of Blair-Drummond, or the loch of Forfar, or the skulls procured, which Dr Fleming hopes to find, we remain without the slightest evidence of the rhinoceros' having been a postdiluvial inhabitant of Scotland.

Case IV.-Fossil Hippopotami.

A hippopotamus is recorded by Lee, in his Natural History of Lancashire, as having been found under a peat-bog in that county.

This evidence is unfortunately too imperfect to be of use in a disputed point. We simply learn from it that the bones were not in the peat, but under it; but whether the foundation on which this peat-bog lay was a bed of postdiluvian shell marl, or of diluvial clay or gravel, we are not informed. The analogy of the other localities in which the ippopotamus has been found in England, leads to the latter hypothesis.

Dr Fleming concludes, "These animals, formerly inhabitants of this country, have their remains preserved, not only in peat-bogs and marl-beds, but likewise in the silt of our great rivers; in the valley of the Thames, for example, they occur in the regular stratified clay, sand, gravel, and peat." As this conclusion is founded chiefly on the cases I have already discussed, it must stand or fall with them. He proceeds to support it further, by stating, on the misinterpreted authority of Mr Trimmer's paper in the Philosophical Transactions, that the hippopotamus and elephant occur in the valley of the Thames, in the regular stratified clay, sand, gravel, and peat. In reply to this, I venture to assert, that no remains of this kind have ever been found in the peat-bogs of any part of the valley of the Thames, and still less in the regular stratified clay, that is, the London clay. The case described by Mr Trimmer is that of the brick-earth-pits at Brentford, which I

visited last week, and where there is not the smallest trace of any kind of peat-bog to be scen. The patches of peat mentioned by Mr Trimmer in his paper, as being only two or three inches thick, and of small extent, were portions of drifted peat, or other vegetable matter that became lodged and entangled in the sand and gravel, at the same time with the bones in question. Their extent must have been very small, for not a particle of peat is now visible, although a larger section is open than existed at the time when Mr Trimmer made his observations.

But even admitting all the facts which Dr Fleming contends for as to this point, and supposing it proved that the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, hyæna, and other lost animals, have existed recently in Europe, and been extirpated by man, and that we found their remains in post diluvian deposits of peat, and silt, and fresh-water marl; they would only be in the same predicament with the horse, the ox, the fox, the wolf, the boar, the beaver, and others, whose bones are common to these postdiluvial formations, as well as to antediluvian caves and fissures, and to beds of diluvial gravel: still every atom of the evidence contained in my Reliquiæ Diluviana would remain unaffected by this discovery, and the great and universal phenomena of diluvial deposits would still be equally inexplicable, without appealling to the agency of a transient and general inundation of the earth.*

Dr Fleming, however, at page 326, speaking of what Mr Bald denominates the "old alluvial cover," and many Eng

Dr Fleming, speaking of the gradual extirpation of certain well known animals in this country and on the continent, says, "These changes have all taken place in the course of the last six or eight centuries; in ages that have preceded, the same causes must have been in more or less active operation," &c. In short, by the theory of gradual extirpation, he would explain the extinction of the lost species of elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, hyæna, &c. over Europe. Is it not incumbent on him first, to show at what period such animals as these, much too formidable to be overlooked, were ever known to have existed? Can he give any reason why hyænas should have been extirpated at a more early period than wolves, had they ever existed in postdiluvian Britain? Or is it probable, that the savage hordes which inhabited Germany before its occupation by the Romans, should have utterly destroyed such powerful animals as the elephant and rhinoceros, as well as the hyæna, from the impenetrable fastnesses of the great Hercynian forest, when animals of the same kind have not yet ceased to abound in the woods of India and the wilds of Africa, in spite of a farther persecution of nearly two thousand years? Surely the theory of their extinction by the savage natives, preceding the Roman invasion of these countries, is a matter of the highest improbability; their existence at that time, and subsequent extirpation, is, in the utter silence of Cæsar and Tacitus, and all later historians, and even of tradition, a moral impossibility.

lish mineralogists "diluvium," concludes, that "the partial occurrence of these strata, their limited extent,-great difference of character in neighbouring districts,—the presence of remains of terrestrial animals,-and the absence of marine exuviæ, demonstrate that a universal flood possessing the velocity some have assigned to it, had no share in this formation." Here again we are obliged to differ from Dr Fleming as to matters of fact.

1. With respect to the asserted "partial occurrence of these strata, and their limited extent," I know not what may have been his opportunities of locomotion and observation; but I dare assert, that, in the whole course of my own geological travels, from Cornwall to Caithness, from Calais to the Carpathians, in Ireland or Italy, I have scarcely ever gone a niile, without finding a perpetual succession of deposits of gravel, sand, or loam, in situations that cannot be referred to the action of modern torrents, rivers, or lakes, or any other existing causes; and with respect to the still more striking diluvial phenomena of drifted masses of rocks; the greater part of the northern hemisphere, from Moscow to the Mississippi, is described by various geological travellers as strewed, on its hills as well as valleys, with blocks of granite and other rocks of enormous magnitude, which have been drifted (mostly in a direction from north to south) a distance sometimes of many hundred miles from their native bed, across mountains and valleys, lakes and seas, by a force of water, which must have possessed a velocity to which nothing that occurs in the actual state of the globe affords the slightest parallel. I must therefore deny, that the occurrence of these deposits is partial, or their extent limited.

2. That their character is different in neighbouring districts I readily concede; for it often differs in the same field, and even in the same pit or quarry; as well it may do, considering the turbulent condition induced on the earth, by the inundation of which it is the wreck and rubbish.

3. The presence of the remains of terrestrial animals, simply shows that they had perished; but whether they were drifted from other countries to those in which we now find them, or how far they may have been floated backwards and forwards, by the flux and reflux of the mighty currents then in motion, before the carcasses became putrid, and the bones fell piecemeal into the gravel, as the agitation was subsiding, we have no means to judge; and, without the evidence afforded us by the interior of caves and fissures, we should have

been unable to prove that the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, and hyæna, had ever inhabited Europe; as it might have been argued, that these animals were all drifted from the tropical regions now occupied by such genera, by the waters of the same inundation that produced the superficial deposits of gravel, loam, and sand, in which alone their bones had been discovered before the investigations that have been made into the contents of caves and fissures.

4. The absence of "marine exuviæ," is another case of misstated facts. Had Dr Fleming ever examined the diluvial clay which forms the cliffs more than sixty feet high at the brick-kilns on the south of Peterhead, he might have found (as I did last summer), marine shells imbedded in it, similar to those which now live in the adjacent seas; and had he further examined the shells found in diluvium not many years ago in the bed of the Paisley Canal, three miles from Glasgow, and of which a list was published by Captain Laskey,* whilst a very perfect collection of them is preserved in the cabinet of Dr Browne of Glasgow; or, had he ever seen or heard of the thousands of acres of marine shells of existing species, which cover more than one fourth part of the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, so as to form an integral part of their gravel pits, and to be mixed in every possible proportion with ordinary diluvial gravel, sand, and clay, and with the bones of elephants and other land animals; he would never have advanced such arguments as these to "demonstrate" that a universal flood had no share in the formation of what many English mineralogists have called diluvium.

I considered it needless when I was at Edinburgh, to investigate the fact asserted by Dr Fleming at page 326, that a copper battle-axe was found in digging the Union Canal at Bonnington, in the same kind of clay or till with the tusk of an elephant, as its accuracy is questioned by Professor Jameson himself, in a note subjoined to the passage in question; but I here adduce it as another of the mistakes that cannot but arise from neglecting or denying the distinction between Alluvium and Diluvium.

It remains only to notice a few more errors into which Dr Fleming has fallen, in his Observations on my History of Bones discovered in Caves and Fissures.

With respect to the habits of modern hyænas, I have to

* See Annals of Philosophy, Feb. 1814, vol. iii. p. 150; and Wern. Soc. Mem. vol. iv. p. 568.

offer him my thanks for the manner in which he has disposed of the evidence of Dr Knox, in the fourth volume of the Wernerian Memoirs, p. 385, as inapplicable, on the ground of difference of species between the Fossil and Cape Hyæna. But I am surprised he should characterise as valuable the notices of any writer who argues, that, because lions and tigers do not devour bones, therefore hyenas also do not eat them; or that, because he himself has never seen an hyæna in the act of dragging off its prey, therefore they never do so. Is the positive evidence, then, which I have quoted from Brown, Sparman, and Busbequius, who assert the fact, that hyænas do drag off their prey, to be set aside by the negative fact, that Dr Knox has never seen them in the act of doing it? Since the publication of my last edition, I have seen an officer from India, Captain Sykes, who has often hunted hyænas in the vicinity of Bombay; and from him I learn that he has not only seen heaps of bones accumulated at the mouths of their dens, but that, in digging one from its hole, he observed large quantities of bones flung out with the dirt and rubbish. from the interior of the den.

Dr Fleming, at page 328, gives his opinion, that the "bones at Plymouth were washed by some land-flood from an open fissure, and deposited in confusion in the neighbouring caverns." Is he then ready to maintain, that the bones in the caves and fissures, and the gravel that occurs on the summit of the rock at Gibraltar, were deposited also by what he calls a land-flood?—and that many hundred other caves and fissures along the coast and islands of the Mediterranean, and the Adriatic, in Dalmatia, and in Germany, at various elevations from 2 to 2000 feet above the level of the sea, were all so similarly affected by partial land-floods, that there is not a tittle of difference in the effects produced on each and every one of them by such numerous and independent inundations? Or is he prepared to show, how a land-food could cover the summit of the insulated rock of Gibraltar, at the height of 1439 feet above the sea, without inundating at the same time at least nine-tenths of Europe, and to point out the source from whence the waters of such a land-flood could be derived? Unless he is so, it is in vain to say a partial land-flood may have risen a hundred feet at Plymouth, and moved the bones, and carried the mud and pebbles into the caves at Oreston; for this is but one of many hundred analogous cases of such bones imbedded in similar mud and pebbles that must be acVOL. II. NO. 6.

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