1874.] in Kent’s-Cavern.  - 143 
stalagmitic floor. His conviction was decided and firm that 
before the commencement of the formation of the stalagmite 
the tools occupied the place in which he discovered them ; 
and when he found Dr. Buckland inclined to attribute them 
toa more modern date by supposing that the ancient Britons 
had scooped out ovens in the stalagmite, and that they had 
thus got admission to the cave-earth, he replied—‘‘ Without 
stopping to dwell on the difficulty of ripping up a solid floor, 
which, notwithstanding the advantage of undermining and 
the exposure of its edges, still defies all our efforts, though 
commanding the apparatus of the quarry, I am bold to say 
that in no instance have I discovered evidence of breaches 
or ovens in the floor, but one continuous plate of stalagmite 
diffused uniformly over the loam.” ‘‘It is painful,” he 
adds, ‘‘ to dissent from so high authority, and more particu- 
larly so from my concurrence generally in his views of the 
phenomena of these caves, which three years’ personal 
observation has in almost every instance enabled me to 
verity.”’* 
Mr. Godwin-Austen, who, familiar with MacEnery’s 
discoveries, had supplemented them with independent 
researches of his own, writes thus, in 1840:—‘ Arrow- 
heads and knives of flint occur in all parts of the 
cave, and throughout the entire thickness of the clay ; and 
no distinction founded on distribution or relative position 
can be observed whereby the human can be separated from 
the other veliquie.”t It is noteworthy, perhaps, that this 
important statement entirely removed the chief difficulty 
which MacEnery felt, in view of the hypothesis that man 
was, in Devonshire, contemporary with the extinct cave 
mammals. He believed that the flint tools did not occur at 
_ depths of more than a few inches in the cave-earth. It was 
reserved for Godwin-Austen to discover that, like the fossil 
bones, they were to be met with at all depths. 
In 1846, a committee appointed by the Torquay Natural 
History Society carried on some very limited but most 
careful explorations in the Cavern; and make the follow- 
ing statement in their report, drawn up by Mr. E. Vivian, 
and read, the following year, to the Geological Society of 
London and the British Association :—“‘ After taking every 
precaution, by sweeping the surface and examining most 
minutely whether there were any traces of the floor having 
been previously disturbed, we broke through the solid 
* Trans. Devon. Assoc., vol. iii., pp. 334 and 338. 
+ Trans. Geol. Soc. of London, (2nd series), vol. vi., p. 444. 1842. 
