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Updated: September 6, 2025
Caverns were the haunts of hyenas, tigers, bears, and other beasts of prey, which dragged into them the bodies of their victims, and left many of their bones to become embedded in stalagmite or in the muddy deposit left by floods, while herbivorous animals were often carried into them by these floods, or by falling down the swallow-holes which often open into caverns from above.
It appears that so long as the flowing water had force enough to propel stony fragments, no layer of fine mud could accumulate, and so long as there was a regular current capable of carrying in fine mud and bones, no superficial crust of stalagmite.
Pengelly, and others, in the Brixham cave near Torquay, in 1858, demonstrated that flint knives were there imbedded in such a manner in loam underlying a floor of stalagmite as to prove that man had been an inhabitant of that region when the cave-bear and other members of the ancient post-pliocene fauna were also in existence. The absence of gnawed bones had led Dr.
It may also be remarked that, common as is the occurrence of diluvial animal bones in the muddy deposits of caverns, such remains have not hitherto been met with in the caves of the Neanderthal; and that the bones, which were covered by a deposit of mud not more than four or five feet thick, and without any protective covering of stalagmite, have retained the greatest part of their organic substance.
Again, if an implement of human workmanship is found in close proximity to the leg of a bear, or the horn of a reindeer, of extinct species, in an ancient cavern, and all covered by a floor of stalagmite, we see not how the conclusion is to be avoided that they were introduced into the cave before the stalagmite was formed; and in that case the inference that they were contemporaneous, or nearly so, may well be left to take care of itself.
I said no fossil remains had been found, but the level floors of the great halls are continually being raised by fresh layers of stalagmite from the water dropping from the roof, and no one knows what may lie under them.
At two or three other places on the floor, and on projections from the side walls of the cave, were other ollas, or broken water-troughs of stone, for catching water. Lighting our candles we went behind a pendant veil of thick stalagmite. At some spots hummocks of snow-white crystalline matter, with a reticulated surface, had been deposited by dripping water.
This esplanade was 66 feet by 30 at the time of Pictet's visit, deeper in the middle than at the sides, and mounting the rock at the farther side of the cave; there was a small stalagmite at one side, but that would seem to have been the only ornamentation displayed. The temperature was 34°·7, a foot above the ice, and 58° in the external air.
While it continued, deposits many feet in depth gradually accumulated on the floors of the caverns, slowly filling them up. And that, in some cases at least, this cave residence ended a very long time ago, we are assured, for since then a great thickness of stalagmite, which is deposited with extreme slowness, has spread over the lower cave deposits and sealed them in.
From the floor and sides of the cup the water oozes into the softer limestone around and beneath; but, as in all these limestones, it does not ooze indiscriminately, but follows certain more free paths. These become soon lined and finally blocked with stalagmite, and it is these tubes and threads of stalagmite which afterwards in the pseudo-fossil represent the diverging rootlets.
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