CLOSE OP POST- PLIOCENE — ADVENT OP MAN. 307 



tors. Lastly, in and upon the black mould are many 

 fallen blocks from the roof of the cave. 



There can be no doubt that this cave and the neigh- 

 bouring one of Brixham have done very much to 

 impress the minds of British geologists with ideas of 

 the great antiquity of man, and they have, more than 

 any other Post-glacial monuments, shown the persis- 

 tence of some animals now extinct up to the human 

 age. Of precise data for determining time, they have, 

 however, given nothing. The only measures which 

 seem to have been applied, namely, the rate of 

 growth of stalagmite and the rate of erosion of the 

 neighbouring valleys, are, from the very sequence 

 of the deposits, evidently uncertain; and there seems 

 to be no available and constant measure derivable from 

 other facts, and capable of being accurately applied. 

 We are therefore quite uncertain as to the number 

 of centuries involved in the filling of this cave, and 

 must remain so until a surer system of calculation is 

 adopted. We may, however, attempt to sketch the 

 series of events which it indicates. ' ^ 



The animals found in Rentes Hole are all ^^ Post- 

 glacial.''' They therefore inhabited the country after 

 it rose from the great Glacial submergence. Perhaps 

 the first colonists of the coasts of Devonshire in this 

 period were the cave bears, migrating on floating ice, 

 and subsisting, like the Arctic bear, and the black 

 bears of Anticosti, on fish, and on the garbage cast 

 up by the sea. They found Kent's Hole a sea- side 

 cavern, with perhaps some of its galleries still full of 



