have commonly their parts or branches entire as when they fell; and the fractured specimens are generally found in caves, and _show marks of the teeth of the ossivorous hyænas_ by which they had been gnawed; thus at the same time revealing the mode in which they were introduced into those caves, and _proving the contemporaneous existence in this island of both kinds of mammalia_." [Illustration: Fig. 111. MEGACEROS HIBERNICUS. (_Irish Elk._)] But the contents of the bone caves, consisting in large part of the extinct mammals, ought of themselves to be decisive in this question. As the opening of the Kirkdale cavern is only about four feet each way, a diluvial wave, charged with the wreck of the lower latitudes, could scarce have washed into such an orifice any considerable number of the intertropical animals. And yet there has been found in this cave,--with the teeth of a very young mammoth, of a very great tiger, of a tiger-like animal whose genus is extinct, of a rhinoceros, and of a hippopotamus,--the fragmentary remains of from two to three hundred hyænas. Further, even supposing, what is impossible, that a diluvial wave had swept them all from the tropics into the four-feet hole, on what principle is it to be explained that the bones thus washed into the cave should be all gnawed bones, even those of the hyænas themselves, whereas the bones of the same creatures found in the mammaliferous deposits of the country bear no marks of teeth? Mr. Granville Penn, however, gets over the difficulty of the cave, which is hollowed, I may mention, in a limestone of the Oolitic series, inclosing the ammonite and belemnite, by asserting that its mammaliferous contents may be _somewhat older than itself_! The limestone existed, he holds, as but a mere unformed pulp at the time the intertropical animals came floating northwards: they sank into it; the gasses evolved during putrefaction blew up the plastic lime above them into a great oblong bubble, somewhat as a glass-blower blows up a bottle; and hence the Kirkdale cavern, with its gnawed bones and its amazing number of teeth. And certainly a _geologic_ argument of this ingenious character has one signal advantage,--it is in no danger whatever of being answered by the geologists. Mr. Penn, in a second edition of his work, expressed some surprise that an Edinburgh Reviewer should have merely stated his _argument_ without replying to it!! But I need not dwell on the arguments for a universal deluge which have been derived from the superficial deposits. They all belong to an immature age of geologic science, and are of no value whatever. Let us pass rather to the consideration of the facts and arguments which militate against the universality of the catastrophe.