21 
jungles of Bengal. It endures the cold of a Siberian winter as well as it endures 
the heat of a tropical forest, and its jaws and teeth and bones may be found alike 
among the Alpine willows or the tropical palm. We know what the food of the 
reindeer, mammoth, and tichorhine rhinoceros was, and we may be certain that 
the carnivores which feed upon them were adapted to the climate that suited these 
herbivores. Apropos of the British lion it happened to me not very long ago to 
say before a British lady that we had found the remains of his majesty in King 
Arthur’s cave, with the remains of elephants and rhinoceroses. She smiled 
contemptuously, and said, ‘“‘ Well, Mr. Symonds, you may believe it, but I don’t ; 
not a word of it.”” Of course all I could do was to bow profoundly. I shall never 
attempt to convince that recent British lady. But to the ladies of the Woolhope 
Club I would say, go and see the skeletons of the recent animals in the College of 
Surgeons, and then the wonderful collection of fossils, cave lions, and hyenas in 
the museum at Taunton, and you will soon recognise in the teeth and jaws sent to 
Gloucester Museum and those which you see to-day the absolute identity of 
structure, and will make one step towards a lesson in that wonderful science of 
comparative anatomy, which restores to our knowledge the animals of bye-gone 
ages before lions or hyzna ever existed. 
The occurrence of human bones in these caves is limited to the superficial 
deposits, and none have been hitherto found fossilised as are the remains of the 
rhinoceros, horse, elephant and hyzna, but flakes of flint and scrapers have been 
found in such positions that it is impossible to avoid the belief that men occasion- 
ally frequented the caves during the occupation of the hyenas. There is no flint 
in the district, and none occurs for many miles, so they must have been brought 
there by humanagency. I myself exhumed several, and so did Mr. Scobell during 
the first excavations at King Arthur’s cave, lying side by side with the bones of 
the extinct animals, and sealed and protected by the same stalactitic floor. With 
these also may be seen in Gloucester Museum some rude stone cores, which the 
cave men attempted to flake off and then threw aside. These cores are struck 
from “old Wye pebbles, and are like some I saw at Mentone in the museum, and 
which came from the caves where the skeleton men of the Red Rocks are found 
imbedded, with the remains of the extinct animals also. There is one of these 
cores placed upon the table in order that those ignorant of the subject may see 
what a so-called core is, viz., a stone from which flakes for scrapers or knives have 
been struck off. 
I visited the Mentone Caves again and again, in company with my friend 
Mr. Mogridge, who explained to me the principal phenonema when the caves were 
searched ; and not only in the caves where the skeletons are found at Mentone, but 
at Nice and various other places in France, we find overwhelming evidence that 
man occasionally frequented those caves at the same time that animals, now 
extinct, lived on the shores of the Mediterranean. And such, I believe, is the 
evidence of these flints we find in the caverns of the Wye. I have already 
occupied so much time on this occasion, in describing the animals found in the 
Wye caves, that I must deal briefly with the physical geological phenonema 
