GEOGRAPHY AND ANTIQUITIES. 339 



I 



veloped in its jaw after all its milk-teeth had been replaced by the 

 second set." 



The Professor next showed that in the same manner as our 

 language and appliances are derived from and indissolubly con- 

 nected with those of the generations which hare gone before us, 

 so it is with the laws, manners, and customs, and, within certain 

 limits, the beliefs, morals, and religions of the present day. 

 " How many of our legal and social customs belong to a totally 

 different stage of society, and, like the parts which have become 

 rudimentary in organisms, survive only as memorials of a past 

 condition of things ! As single instances, take most of the cus- 

 toms relating to copyhold lands, the admission to them by a 

 rod, the service to be performed in respect of them, in fact, the 

 whole nature of the tenure ; take our armorial bearings, for which 

 we have no longer shields, and our crests, for which we have no 

 longer helmets ; and to realize their full meaning we must carry 

 our minds back through centuries. Take, again, many of our 

 festive customs, which can be traced back to heathen times ; our 

 belief in witches (excusable, perhaps, in Lancashire), our trust 

 in omens, and in lucky and unlucky days, and we see how many of 

 our hereditary prepossessions are derived from a simpler stage of 

 culture. But if this be so now, the same must have held good in 

 earlier days, and the simplest creeds and lowest mental condi- 

 tions that we meet with in historical times would seem to be but 

 derivatives from something simpler and lower still." 



ETHNOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 



Mr. W. Boyd Dawkins, at the meeting of the British Association, 

 made a report on the exploration of the Victoria Cave, at Settle, 

 Yorkshire. Although the cave was discovered on the day of the 

 Queen's coronation, no systematic investigation was made until 

 the spring of the present year, when a committee, under the 

 chairmanship of Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, commenced the 

 labor. In the upper strata there were found numerous traces of 

 occupation of the cave. Among these were traces of the 

 hog, the sheep, and the horse, and there was also evidence, 

 in the form of 2 " spurs," of the use of the domestic fowl. 

 There were also traces of the reindeer, the badger, and other 

 wild animals, which went to show that the inhabitants of 

 the cave, like the gypsies of the present day, used some of these 

 animals now regarded as vermin as food. There were also 2 

 Roman coins found, one a Trajan, and one a Tetrarchus, the ivory 

 boss of a sword, some beautiful brooches, amulets, and bronze 

 rings. The discovery of the coins and some articles of the Sar- 

 nian pottery, and the domestic fowl (which was introduced by the 

 Romans), seemed to show that this particular occupation of the 

 cave occurred after the Roman period ; and he believed it likely 

 that the inhabitants were Roman colonists, who were obliged to flee 

 before the advance of the exterminating Angles and Saxons. In 

 a lower stratum of deposits, separated from the Roman stratum 



