2 PRELIMINARY -REMARKS. CHAP. I. 



evidence, seeing that so many caves have been inhabited 

 by a succession of tenants, and have been selected by man, 

 as a place not only of domicile, but of sepulture, while some 

 caves have also served as the channels through which the 

 waters of occasional land-floods or engulfed rivers have 

 flowed, so that the remains of living beings which have 

 peopled the district at more than one era may have subse 

 quently been mingled in such caverns and confounded 

 together in one and the same deposit. But the facts brought 

 to light in 1858, during the systematic investigation of the 

 Brixham cave, near Torquay in Devonshire, which will be 

 described in the sequel, excited anew the curiosity of the 

 British public, and prepared the way for a general admission 

 that scepticism in regard to the bearing of cave evidence in 

 favour of the antiquity of man had previously been pushed 

 to an extreme. 



Since that period, many of the facts formerly adduced in 

 favour of the co-existence in ancient times of man with 

 certain species of mammalia long since extinct have been 

 re-examined in England and on the Continent, and new cases 

 bearing on the same question, whether relating to caves or 

 to alluvial strata in valleys, have been brought to light. To 

 qualify myself for the appreciation and discussion of these 

 cases, I have visited, in the course of the last three years, 

 many parts of England, France, and Belgium, and have 

 communicated personally or by letter with not a few of the 

 geologists, English and foreign, who have taken part in these 

 researches. Besides explaining in the present volume the 

 results of this enquiry, I shall give a description of the 

 glacial formations of Europe and North America, that I may 

 allude to the theories entertained respecting their origin, and 

 consider their probable relations in a chronological point of 

 view to the human epoch, and why throughout' a great part 

 of the northern hemisphere they so often interpose an abrupt 



