28 
Now it is to the close of the glacial period we must refer the occupation of 
the Wye caves by the cave lion and hyena, for they preyed upon the Arctic 
elephant (or mammoth) the Arctic rhinoceros, and the reindeer, all invading forms 
so to speak, driven by the cold from the distant North. Probably the climate 
here was comparatively temperate, though there is abundant evidence that glaciers 
then filled all our mountain vales, and in some places stretched down to the sea. 
During the same period the cave animals left numerous remains in the old river 
deposits of that epoch, and in these river deposits there are often large masses of 
angular rocks, which could only have been carried by floating ice. They lived, 
too, before the valleys had been excavated by the existing rivers to the present 
depth, and it is a question to me if the Wye has not excavated its channel through 
hard limestone rocks three or four hundred feet since the cave lion lived and died 
by the long ago ancient Wye. 
In King Arthur’s Cave we found a quantity of silt, evidently deposited by 
water, and in this silt were several Wye pebbles, which are just like those now 
washed down by the Wye from Plinlimmon and Builth. I believe that an ancient 
Wye once rolled its waters into the cave in flood time; those who do not can 
perhaps explain better the presence of the silt and pebbles, which certainly did 
not come from the stars. This summer, too, I have been enabled, through the 
generosity of a few friends—Mr. Crompton Roberts, Colonel Ratcliffe, Mr. Lucy, 
Captain Price, and others—to open two more caves at a lower level than is King 
Arthur’s or the other Great Doward caverns. The result was unfortunate as 
regards obtaining fossil remains of the extinct animals. The first cave at Branland 
has only furnished the tooth of a deer. The second on the right bank of the Wye, 
about 200 feet above the river, has furnished the canine teeth of the common 
bear, but no extinct mammalian remains. It looks, therefore, as if the mammoth 
and hairy rhinoceros did not live on with the hyena down to the period repre- 
sented by these lower caves. Such, then, is a brief reswmé of this cave history 
and its human and animal relics of ages long since passed. It was during the later 
cold periods of the glacial epoch that we are now certain that man inhabited the 
continent of Europe and what are now our islands of Great Britain ; when there 
were no Straits of Dover, no salt waves flowing between Ireland and England. 
We find now continually, in England and on the Continent, his rude weapons and 
artificially worked flints in old river deposits or estuarine drifts where rivers have 
ceased to flow and the salt waves no longer roll. Man was living here in Great 
Britain in times when you might have sailed above the sites of Worcester and 
Gloucester, on the waters of the Severn sea. Man was living here in England 
with the mammoth and the long-haired rhinoceros, and has left his flint imple- 
ments in caves then haunted by the hyena and the cave bear, which he 
visited for shelter or for refuge. Not only so: in France he has left behind him 
bone ornaments and weapons made of the rhinoceros and reindeer, on which he 
feasted, and even in some instances he foreshadowed the art of a Landseer by 
drawing rude sketches of the hairy elephant and the reindeer on the very bones 
of the animals he had slain anddevoured. I could say much upon the vast changes 
that have come over this portion of the planet we now inhabit since these old men 
