y acquainted with the science to know that the
place and relations of its various formations have been long since
determined, and now as certainly form the regulating data of the
practical miner, as the places and relations long since determined by
the geographer form the regulating data of the practical navigator or
engineer. It is as certain, for instance, that the Oolitic system
underlies the Green Sand and the Chalk, with all the various formations
of the Tertiary division,--Eocene Miocene, Pliocene, and
Pleistocene,--as that York is situated to the south of Edinburgh, or
that both these cities lie very considerably to the north of London and
Paris. And the anti-geologist who would argue, in the heat of
controversy, that the Oolite and the Pleistocene were contemporaneous
deposits, would be no more worthy of reply than the anti-geographer who
would assert, in order to serve some argumentative purpose, that the
North Cape lies in the same latitudinal parallel as South California, or
that Terra del Fuego is but a day's sailing from Iceland. And yet such,
as I intimated on a former evening, is the line taken up by Mr.
Granville Penn, in dealing with the difficulties of the Kirkdale Cave,
so remarkable for its accumulations of gnawed bones of the Pleistocene
ages,--especially for its bones of hyaenas, tigers, bears, wolves,
rhinoceroses, and elephants. The cave occurs in the moorlands of
Yorkshire, in a limestone rock of that Oolitic division to which the
Oxford Clay and the Coral Rag belong, and contains corals and shells
that had passed into extinction long even ere the Tertiary period began;
while in the cave itself, mixed with bones of the extinct mammals of the
geologic age in immediate advance of the present one, there have been
found the contemporary remains of animals that still live in our fields
and woods, such as the hare, the rabbit, the weasel, and the water rat.
And we find Mr. Penn assigning both the Oolitic rock in which the cave
is hollowed, and the mammalian remains of the cave itself, equally to
the period of the deluge. The limestone existed at that time, it would
seem, as a soft calcareous paste, into which the animal remains, floated
northwards from intertropical regions on the waters of the Flood, were
precipitated in vast quantities, and sank, and then, fermenting under
the putrefactive influences, the gas which they formed blow up the
yielding lime and mud around them into a long narrow cave, just