Catastrophic Revelations - The Rocks Don't Lie - page 101

Buckland reasoned that the quartzite pebbles had to have been rounded before being in-
corporated into the conglomerate. He thought that a great flood then ripped the distinctive
pebbles back out of the rock, strewing them down the Thames all the way to London.
Buckland claimed that a great flood provided a better explanation for the distribution
of the diluvial gravels than did other ideas—modern rivers were too small to account for
regionally extensive gravel sheets or to move the largest boulders found in the deposits.
And what at the time seemed like an apparently global distribution of similar deposits was
thought to demonstrate that a geologically recent flood had affected the surface of the en-
tire world. Again, Buckland was confident that a great flood provided the best explanation
for his geological observations.
It should come as no surprise, then, that he marveled over what he considered proof of
Noah's Flood when workmen in 1821 discovered a bone-filled cave near Kirkdale in York-
shire. One of the first to explore the cavern, Buckland stumbled upon a bewildering variety
of bones, including those of hyenas, tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses.
All these bones were embedded beneath stalactites in the red mud of the cave floor. It was
a spectacular discovery indeed.
How did the bones of so many African species get mixed up together in a British cave?
Seeing how some of the bones were gnawed, Buckland concluded hyenas had dragged
them into their den long before the Flood, which he thought washed in the cave's upper-
most layer of red mud and more bones. The thin stalactites capping the mud confirmed
a recent origin, consistent with Cuvier's most recent geological catastrophe of five or six
thousand years ago.
Inspired, Buckland gathered geological facts thought to demonstrate the reality of Noah's
Flood into his 1823 Relics of the Flood . In it he described great accumulations of bones in
“superficial and almost universal deposits of loam and gravel, which seems impossible to
account for unless we ascribe them to a transient deluge, affecting universally, simultan-
eously, and at no very distant period, the entire surface of our planet.” 5 The case for Noah's
Flood appeared to build once again, this time in the interpretation of surficial sediments.
Buckland combined his description of Kirkdale Cave with a synopsis of similar evidence
for a recent deluge from other European caves. The continent's surficial gravel contained