Essay on the Theory of the EarthCuvier, Georges, baron
Science
Essay on the Theory of the Earth
Cuvier, Georges, baron
Geology; Paleontology
The presence of bones in the clayey mud of the floor of the
Adelsberg cave accords well with this hypothesis; but the case
is different with those which I found in the heaps of limestone
blocks and clayey mud. The bones are not at the surface of the
heap, but rather towards its middle part, buried among the blocks,
and crushed by them. From this position, and the height at which
the skeleton mentioned above occurs from the floor of the cave,
it cannot be supposed that it formed part of the bones with which
the bottom of the cave is strewed, nor that the blocks had fallen
upon it. The bones contained in the heap in question must have been
brought into their present position at the same time, and by the
same cause as the limestone blocks. They could not, therefore, have
belonged to animals which inhabited these caves, and died there
peaceably.
If it be remarked, that these blocks, which are sometimes very
large, heaped up above one another, and mixed with clayey mud, have
their angles perfectly fresh, and are of the same nature as the
limestone of the walls of the cave, it cannot be admitted that they
have been brought from a distance. This mode of arrangement could
only have been produced by their falling from the roof of the cave.
The following facts also give support to this opinion. In the cave
of Gaylenreuth, a fissure of the third grotto, was the means, in
1784, of disclosing a new one, fifteen feet long and four broad,
where the greatest quantity of hyena or lion bones were found.
_The aperture was much too small for these animals to have passed
through it._
In a cave discovered in 1824, in the district of Lanark in Upper
Canada, Mr Bigsby observed, that the floor was covered with debris
of brown granular limestone, similar to that of the walls, and
that the bones especially formed a heap there. He thinks that the
animal, whose bones have been found in this cave, was much too
large to have got into it alive or entire.--_Silliman’s Journal,
June 1825_, p. 354.
It must therefore be also admitted here, either that the bones
could only have got into the cave in the same manner as the heaps
of blocks found in the Adelsberg cave; that is to say, by falling
from the roof, or that the apertures have been closed since the
period at which the animals were buried.
If it be now considered, _1st_, That the surface of the secondary
limestone mountains of Carniola is covered with a layer of reddish
clay; and, _2dly_, That the clayey mud of the heap in the Adelsberg
cave is mineralogically the same as that which forms the floor
of the cave; may it not be supposed, that the same catastrophe
which produced the heaps in the cave may have, at the same time,
introduced into it the reddish clayey mud of the surface, which, by
extending itself over the floor of the cave, would have contributed
to cover the bones that were lying there?
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