"The chief localities, which centre on the hills around Palermo, arrest attention from the extraordinary quantity of bones of _Hippopotami_ (in complete hecatombs) which have there been found. Twenty tons of these bones were shipped from around the one cave of San Ciro, near Palermo, within the first six months of exploiting them, and they were so fresh that they were sent to Marseilles to furnish animal charcoal for use in the sugar factories. How could this bone breccia have been accumulated?... The only suggestion that has been made is that the bones are those of successive generations of _Hippopotami_ which went there to die. But this is not the habit of the animal, and besides, the bones are those of animals =of all ages down to the foetus=, nor do they show traces of weathering or exposure.... "My supposition is, therefore, that when the island was submerged, the animate in the plain of Palermo naturally retreated, as the waters advanced, deeper into the amphitheatre of hills until they found themselves embayed, as in a seine, with promontories running out to sea on either side and a mural precipice in front. As the area became more and more circumscribed the animals must have thronged together in vast multitudes, crushing into the more accessible caves, and swarming over the ground at their entrance, until overtaken by the waters and destroyed."[65] Our author then adds this summary of his argument: "The extremely fresh condition of the bones, proved by the retention of so large a proportion of animal matter, and the fact that animals of all ages were involved in the catastrophe, shows that the event was geologically, comparatively recent, as other facts show it to have been sudden." That it must have been a good deal more "sudden" than even this author will admit, is evident from the nature of the hippopotamus. I never thought that it was particularly afraid of the water, or likely to be drowned by any such moderate catastrophe as Prestwich invokes in this singular volume. The reader must, however, note that this affair, like the entombment of the mammoth, certainly =took place since man was upon the globe=, even according to the uniformitarians. Would it not be economy of energy to correlate the two together? But if man dates from "Miocene times," as some contend, he must have witnessed half a dozen awful affairs like these, for there is scarcely a country on the globe that has not been under the ocean since then. Let us proceed.