“The hills immediately adjoining this valley are composed of limestone, with a covering of rich mould of various degrees of thickness. One of them, whose base is about thirty acres, rises directly from the edge of the valley, with sides very precipitous, and in one place perfectly perpendicular, of naked limestone. In every part of this hill the superficies comprises as much stone as mould; on the side nearly opposite, the hill is equally high, but the sides not so steep, and the covering of mould thicker; on the other sides the ground only rises in some degree (twenty or thirty feet perhaps), and consists of a thin mould, and immediately under a _very hard_ limestone gravel. Indeed, except where limestone forms the substratum, this is the character of all the soil in the vicinity except the Corkasses, which are evidently alluvial. I am fully aware, that, assuming the destruction of the animals to have been occasioned by a flood, they would naturally have retreated from the water to the hills, and that, as they probably met their fate there, their remains should have been discovered on the summit of the hills, and not in the valley, particularly as one of them is perfectly flat on the top, which contains six or seven acres. I apprehend that the remains of many of them were deposited on the tops of the hills; but as they have _now_ only a slight covering of mould, not sufficient to cover a small dog, they were formerly perfectly bare; and as they were thus devoid of the means of protecting the remains from the atmosphere, whatever was left there soon became decomposed, and resolved into portions of the mould, which is now to be found on the hills. This remark I conceive also to be applicable to the soil with the substratum of limestone gravel, which affords quite as little material for preserving the bones as the hills do. “It is material that I should observe, that of eight heads which we found, none were without antlers; the variety in character also was such as to induce me to imagine, that possibly the females were not devoid of these appendages. Unfortunately, however, from the difficulty of raising them, being saturated with water, and as soft as wet brown paper, only three were at all perfect.