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from tooth-ache, and the lions of North Africa are said to become specially 
dangerous to human beings when age or disease has damaged their teeth, and thus 
induced them to seek for prey of a more fleshy kind than the wild animals which 
form their ordinary food. Wild deer, wild cattle, and even the mountain sheep 
and goats are too tough eating for the old lion with his carious teeth. Still the 
instinct of the lion for fleshy food was shown in the abundance of the bones of the 
large bodied rhinoceros, as already noticed. Mr. Symonds explained the nature 
of the remains, as a preparative to the intended visit of the company to the caves 
from whence they had been exhumed. 
A toilsome walk along the steep lanes under the pitiless sun of July, led the 
party to the western slope of the Great Doward. There, embowered in the 
delicious shade of the overhanging woods, were the two principal caves, which had 
been lighted up for the occasion. The path, a woodland path, such as that in 
which Afneas is said to have met his goddess mother, leads past the caves. It was 
a ‘‘ ladies’ day,” and on this occasion the wood was thronged by a distinguished 
party, many of whom might vie with the goddess and her hero son in their personal 
beauty, while all were equally eager in a nobler chase than that which Virgil has 
described—the pursuit of geologic knowledge. When all were gathered around the 
entrance of the noble cave named after the British hero king, himself a mighty 
hunter and a chief of men like Aineas, the scene was a most picturesque one. As 
the Lecturer stood upon a point of rock discoursing eloquently upon the grand 
facts of primeval history which the cave had yielded to his enterprise, the bright 
sunlight making a ‘‘ chequered shade ” upon the greensward, dotted with the 
gaily dressed groups, and blazing full upon the gray rocky portal, while the dark 
recesses were made bright with artificial light reflected from the earnest upturned 
faces of the auditory, one could not help (mentally) echoing the exclamation of 
Byron, whatever might be said of the appropriateness of the consolation which he 
administered to himself :— 
O that I were a painter ! but my tints 
May serve perhaps as outlines or slight hints. 
When next the club holds a meeting in King Arthur’s Cave, ‘‘ may we be there 
to see !” and may the Club provide at least a photographer to preserve a “* counter- 
feit presentment” of the interesting scene ! 
The Rey. W. 8. Symonps delivered his address as follows :— 
Enough has already been said and written on the subject of King Arthur’s 
Cave on the Great Doward, as well as on the adjoining caves on the property of 
Mrs. Bannerman, of the Leys, to show beyond a doubt that these caverns were 
formerly the dens of wild beasts, which in other ages of the world inhabited 
portions of what is now Great Britain, in vast numbers. There are caverns in 
England and the Continent into which the bones of animals and the cave earth 
and other foreign materials have been washed in by the flow of water from the 
surface or through fissures. There are others where the remains of numerous 
animals are found gnawed and scored by the teeth of carnivorous animals, like 
those found in Wookey Hole and Banwell in Somersetshire, Kirkdale and Settle 
c 
