REVIEWS 551 



ments, worked stones and bones, remains of human and other skeletons, Roman 

 coins, and many other objects were dug up, and careful observations were made 

 of the exact positions in which the various specimens were found. The work 

 thus accomplished is one of the most valuable contributions that have ever been 

 made to our knowledge of the Iron Age in the West of England, and may 

 be compared with the elaborate researches on the site of the Glastonbury Lake 

 Village carried out by Bulleid and St. George Gray. 



The book opens with a long preface by Prof. Boyd Dawkins, who was, as 

 already stated, a pioneer in cave-hunting in this very district. It must be said, 

 however, that some of the statements in this preface are highly questionable, and 

 others are quite misleading. For instance, the discredited terms " river-drift 

 man" and "cave-man" are retained (the river-drift men being made to include 

 the Mousterians, who derive their name from the famous cave Le Moustier), and 

 the reader is led to suppose that all the Late Paleolithic hunters resembled the 

 Eskimos, although it is now known that some of the Late Paleolithic types were 



A vessel of the Eariy Iron Age settlement. 



This is one of ihe oldest vessels found, and H. E. Balch believes it was probably brought 



from Armorica by the settlers. 



(Reproduced by kind permission of H. E. Balch,) 



utterly unlike that boreal race. The author's nine chapters deal successively with 

 the general conformation of the group of caves, with the Iron Age and Romano- 

 British settlement, the Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples of the neighbourhood, 

 the Paleolithic relics, with certain ramifications of the cavern that he has recently 

 explored, with the strange noises of the cave (which have been famous since the 

 days of Clement of Alexandria, and are caused by the escape of imprisoned air), 

 with the Eastwater swallet, with the historical references to Wookey Hole, and 

 with the geological features of the locality. The whole book is profusely illus- 

 trated, many of the drawings and three " period-restorations " being by John 

 Hassall, R.I. Most of the plates are good, but some of the representations, 

 especially those of the bones, are on much too small a scale. Hassall's two 

 restorations of the Iron Age are fascinating, but his third, which is of Pleistocene 

 times, suffers from an over-dose of realism : half-a-dozen quite independent 

 tragedies are being enacted within the space of about an acre ! 



The second chapter, dealing with the Iron Age and Romano-British settlement, 

 is much the longest (100 pages) and most important in the book, The cave does 



