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When an eminent living geologist was prosecuting his researches at Kirkdale cave, Yorkshire, he had calculated so nicely on the antecedent probabilities, that his commands to the labourers were substantially these: "Take your mattocks, and pick up that stone flooring; then take your basket, and fill it with the bones of hyænas and other creatures which you will find there."
Buckland, who examined and described the Kirkdale cave, was at first of opinion that it presented a physical evidence of the Noachian deluge; but he afterwards saw reason to consider its phenomena as of a time far apart from that event, which rests on evidence of an entirely different kind.
Connected with the diluvium is the history of ossiferous caverns, of which specimens singly exist at Kirkdale in Yorkshire, Gailenreuth in Franconia, and other places. They occur in the calcareous strata, as the great caverns generally do, but have in all instances been naturally closed up till the recent period of their discovery.
Buckland published the results of his exploration of the Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire in Reliquiae Diluvianae, and sought to establish that the remains there found pertained to the men who were swept away by Noah's flood.
R. hemitoechus, Falconer, in which the ossification of the septum dividing the nostrils is incomplete in the middle, besides other cranial and dental characters distinguishing it from R. tichorhinus, accompanies Elephas antiquus in most of the oldest British bone-caves, such as Kirkdale, Cefn, Durdham Down, Minchin Hole, and other Gower caverns also found at Clacton, in Essex, and in Northamptonshire.
As a contrast to Helperthorpe, the adjoining hamlet of Weaverthorpe has a church of very early Norman or possibly Saxon date, and an inscribed Saxon stone a century earlier than the one at Kirkdale, near Kirby Moorside.
Mesdames Flanagan and Higgins were executed at Kirkdale Gaol in March of 1884. Now, these are two cases which, if only minor in the wholesale poisoning line when compared with the Van der Linden, Jegado, and Cotton envenomings, yet have their points of interest.
And Buckland, Cuvier's foremost follower across the Channel, had gone even beyond the master, naming the work in which he described the Kirkdale fossils, Reliquiae Diluvianae, or Proofs of a Universal Deluge.
While Kirkdale Cave was evidently the haunt of Hyenas chiefly, other caverns in Germany and France were tenanted in a similar manner by a gigantic species of Bear. Their remains, mingled with those of the animals on which they fed, have been found in great numbers in the Cavern of Gailenreuth, in Franconia.
It was a period when architecture was at a low ebb, and the desire to sweep away antiquity was certainly strong, for those churches not rebuilt from the ground were so hacked and renovated that their interest and picturesqueness has vanished. The churches at Pickering, Middleton, Lastingham, and Kirkdale must, however, be pointed out as priceless exceptions.