a flood, during which the
river Tandoi bore down hundreds of carcasses of rhinoceroses and
buffaloes, and swept away more than one hundred men and women from a
multitude assembled on its banks to celebrate a festival. Whether the
bodies reached the sea, or were deposited, with drift matter, in some
large intervening alluvial plains, we are not informed.[1075]

_Sumatra._--"On the coast of Orissa," says Heynes, "I have seen tigers
and whole herds of black cattle carried along by what are called
freshes, and trees of immense size."[1076]

_In Virginia, 1771._--I might enumerate a great number of local deluges
that have swept through the fertile lands bordering on large rivers,
especially in tropical countries, but I should surpass the limits
assigned to this work. I may observe, however, that the destruction of
the islands, in rivers, is often attended with great loss of lives. Thus
when the principal river in Virginia rose, in 1771, to the height of
twenty-five feet above its ordinary level, it swept entirely away Elk
Island, on which were seven hundred head of quadrupeds,--horses, oxen,
sheep, and hogs,--and nearly one hundred houses.[1077]

The reader will gather, from what was before said respecting the
deposition of sediment by aqueous causes, that the greater number of the
remains of quadrupeds drifted away by rivers must be intercepted by
lakes before they reach the sea, or buried in freshwater formations near
the mouths of rivers. If they are carried still farther, the
probabilities are increased of their rising to the surface in a state of
putrefaction, and, in that case, of being there devoured by aquatic
beasts of prey, or of subsiding into some spots whither no sediment is
conveyed, and, consequently, where every vestige of them will, in the
course of time, disappear.

_Skeletons of animals in recent shell-marl, Scotland._--In some
instances, the skeletons of quadrupeds are met with abundantly in recent
shell-marls in Scotland, where we cannot suppose them to have been
imbedded by the action of rivers or floods. They all belong to species
which now inhabit, or are known to have been indigenous in Scotland. The
remains of several hundred skeletons have been procured within the last
century from five or six small lakes in Forfarshire, where shell-marl
has been worked. Those of the stag (_Cervus Elaphas_) are most numerous;
and if the others be arranged in the order of their relative abundance,
they will near