iQio. USSHER. — Cave-Hunting. 39 



of men who hunted the Mammoth and Rhinoceros in Eng- 

 land, and who had to make large fires in the cave to keep 

 out the Hyaenas, Lions, and perhaps the Machairodus, whose 

 teeth occurred in the cave-earth. 



Beneath this was another stalagmite floor, crystalline from 

 its antiquity, and attaining in places as much as twelve feet 

 in thickness. Below this again was a different deposit, a 

 dark red sandy paste, but of rock-like hardness in places, com- 

 posed of sandstone that had been drifted in from distant hills 

 before the deep valley in front of the cave had been cut out. 

 This rock-breccia, as it was called, contained multitudes of 

 bones of the great Cave-Bear, but no others except twojaws of 

 Lion and a jaw of Fox. Of Hyaenas and Mammoths there was 

 no trace, yet even in this deepest deposit primaeval men had 

 left flint weapons formed of massive cores, showing that they 

 had not arrived at the high art of fashioning spear-heads out 

 of flakes. 



Of Irish bone caves the first two discovered were in Co. Water- 

 ford. At Shandon, near Dungarvan, was an enormous cavern- 

 In 1859 some workmen found there, as they thought, a lot of 

 mutton bones, and threw them aside, but when they came to 

 the tibia of a Mammoth they .showed it as the bone of an Irish 

 giant. The late Mr. Brenan, to whom we owe our knowledge 

 of the discovery^ went to see where it had been found, and 

 succeeded in finding many more bones of Mammoth, Bear, 

 Horse, and Reindeer. The most abundant were those of the 

 Reindeer. These bones are in the National Museum. In 1875 

 I found Professor Leith Adams continuing the researches 

 in Shandon Cave, on which he published a report in the 

 Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy.^ 



He incited me to look out for similar caves, and in 1879, in 

 company with him, I started work at a small cave south of the 

 Cappagh station at Ball3mamintra. It was nearly filled up 

 with deposits, only six inches deep of an orifice being visible 

 at first. We found uppermost, a dark brown earth containing 

 the yellow broken bones of domestic animals and man ; with 

 these were charcoal, hand-made pottery, bone implements, 

 an amber bead and a polished stone celt. In the grey earth 

 beneath this, which formed the second stratum, many bones 

 and portions of antlers of Irish Elk. These were split, and 



1 Proc. R. Dublin Soc, 1859. Nat. Hist. Rev., 1859^. Trans. R. I. Acad., 

 vol. xxvi., 1876. 



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