PLEISTOCENE DEPOSITS OF DERBYSHIRE, 165 
or more mammoth had fallen into the fissure. On careful 
examination, Mr. E. Brown discovered that at some very distant 
period there must have been a swallow hole on the surface of 
the ground of twenty feet long by ten feet wide, narrowing below 
to six feet in width, down the sides of which water had trickled 
and coated them with stalagmite. The fissure was filled up with 
fragments of limestone from the adjacent rocks, rolled boulders 
of grit, and other stones from the country to the north and north 
"west, and a red loamy clay, which it seems were washed there by 
the glacial sea, subsequently to the engulfing of the mammoths, 
the peculiarities of the ground forbidding the supposition that they 
could have been carried there by fresh water streams.* Zhe bones 
not examined have since been identified as those belonging to the 
LTippopotamus and Rhinoceros. 
During the latter part of 1864, 
THOR’S CAVE 
was explored under the supervision of the late Mr. Samuel 
Carrington. It is about four miles from Ilam, its mouth is in the 
north face of a cliff of mountain limestone, at a height of some 25 
feet above the stream below. The roof is lofty, and groined so 
as to give it a Gothic appearance, and it is divided as it were 
into two aisles of buttressed columns. When first entered for the 
purpose of exploration the floor was of clay or red mud, which 
rose at the distance of 40 or 50 feet from the entrance to the 
roof. In this mud were found many tokens of the presence of 
man, in the shape of ornaments and implements of bronze, iron, 
bone, stone, and pottery. Beneath the clay was breccia; and 
under it, in some places, clay again; in this, in a recess at the 
south side, was found the end of a deer’s horn, cut across by 
some rude implement, and perforated with two holes.t These 
are now in the Derby Museum. 
In the Philosophical Transactions, vol. 43, Pp» 265, is an 
_ account ofa human skeleton, and some stags’ horns found near 
* Transactions of the Midland Scientific Association, 1864-5, p. 34. 
+ Transactions of the Midland Scientific Association, 1864-5, p. 1-19. 
