20 CHELTENHAM COLLEGE NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. 
discovery by Philp, the formation of a Committee, including 
Professor Prestwich, Sir Charles Lyell, and Mr. Pengelly, to work it 
out, and the mode of exporing it, were dealt with ‘by the lecturer. 
Its importance lay in the fact that it was a virgin bone cave, and 
the method of working it out was such as to compel belief. This 
method was explained by Mr. Hichens, with the aid of a section of 
the cave. 
The cave itself was due to erosion ; In its bottom came a layer 
of gravel ; consisting of water-worn pebbles, and upon this lay the 
reddish cave earth, varying in thickness from two to four feet, and 
containing flint implements and other works of man mingled with 
the bones and teeth of animals ; lastly the whole was sealed down by 
a layer of stalagmite. A detailed account was given of the things 
that came from the cave earth, and also of the very interesting 
“finds ” in similar positions in the caves of Dordogne, explored by 
M. Lartet and Christy. 
Attention was drawn to the sculptured mammoth tusks and 
reindeer antlers which 80 to prove that the old Stone age men had 
reached a high pitch of artistic culture, and to the discovery of the 
whole mammoth, with its flesh and hide intact, in Siberia, corres- 
ponding exactly with the sculpture on the mammoth tusk. 
But few of the actual remains of the Palaeolithic man himself 
have been brought to light. An account was given, and diagrams 
shown, of the Neanderthal and Engis skulls, and it was pointed out 
that skulls speak with an uncertain sound, as the absolute bulk of the 
brain is not necessarily much less in savage than in civilized man, 
for Esquimaux skulls are known of 1 13 cubic inches capacity, ze, 
hardly less than the largest Teutonic one. As to the way in which 
human remains became mixed with the bones of extinct animals, 
many things suggested that the caves had been used as a den by 
hygzenas—namely, the abundance of hyeena remains, forming 30 to 
40 per cent. of the whole of Kent’s cave, the correspondence of their 
teeth with marks on the bones, the presence of their coprolites, the 
absence of complete long bones, and skulls—and further probability 
was lent to this view by Buckland’s experiments at Wombwell’s 
menagarie, and “ Pengelly ” at the Zoological Gardens, which shewed 
that the fragment of the long leg bone of the ox after it had been 
“eaten” by a hysena corresponds almost exactly with the long bone 
of the extinct ox found in Kent’s cave (diagrams of the long bones 
of ox and extinct ox, hyena jaws, rhinocerus skull, &c.) From 
time to time, however, the hyzena had to give place to roving bands 
