HKB
Cicero, Plutarch, Strabo, and Pliny, Sparta was laid in ruins, part of the summit of Mount Taygetus torn off, and numerous gulfs and fissures caused in the rocks of Laconia.
During the great earthquake of 1693, in Sicily, several thousand people were at once entombed in the ruins of caverns in limestone, at Sortino Vecchio; and, at the same time, a large stream, which had issued for ages from one of the grottoes below that town, changed suddenly its subterranean course, and came out from the mouth of a cave lower down the valley, where no water had previously flowed. To this new point the ancient water-mills were transferred, as I learnt when I visited the spot in 1829.
When the courses of engulfed rivers are thus liable to change, from time to time, by alterations in the levels of a country, and by the rending and shattering of mountain masses, we must suppose that the dens of wild beasts will sometimes be inundated by subterranean floods, and their carcasses buried under heaps of alluvium. The bones, moreover, of individuals which have died in the recesses of caves, or of animals which have been carried in for prey, may be drifted along, and mixed up with mud, sand, and fragments of rocks, so as to form osseous breccias.
In 1833 I had an opportunity of examining the celebrated caves of Franconia, and among others that of Rabenstein, newly discovered. Their general form, and the nature and arrangement of their contents, appeared to me to agree perfectly with the notion of their having once served as the channels of subterranean rivers. This mode of accounting for the introduction of transported matter into the Franconian and other caves, filled up as they often are even to their roofs with osseous breccia, was long ago proposed by M. C. Prevost,[1047] and seems at length to be very generally adopted. But I do not doubt that bears inhabited some of the German caves, or that the cavern of Kirkdale, in Yorkshire, was once the den of hyaenas. The abundance of bony dung, associated with hyaenas' bones, has been pointed out by Dr. Buckland, and with reason, as confirmatory of this opinion.
The same author observed in every cave examined by him in Germany, that deposits of mud and sand, with or without rolled pebbles and angular fragments of rock, were covered over with a single crust of stalagmite.[1048] In the English caves he remarked a similar absence of alterations of alluvium and stalagmite. But Dr. Schmerling has discovered in a cavern at Chockier, about two leagues from Liege, three distinct beds of stalagmite, and between each of them a mass of breccia, and mud mixed with quartz pebbles, and in the three deposits the bones of extinct quadrupeds.[1049]
This exception does not invalidate the generality of the phenomenon pointed out by Dr. Buckland, one cause of which may perhaps be this, that if several floods pass at different intervals of time through a subterranean passage, the last, if it has power to drift along fragments of rock, will also tear up any alternating stalagmitic and alluvial beds that may have been previously formed. Another cause may be, that a particular line of caverns will rarely be so situated, in relation to the lowest levels of a country, as to become, at two distinct epochs, the receptacle of engulfed rivers; and if this should happen, some of the caves, or at least the tunnels of communication, may at the first period be entirely choked up with transported matter, so as not to allow the subsequent passage of water in the same direction.