304 THE STORY OP 1'HE EARTH AND MAN. 



Among' the many pictures which this fertile subject 

 calls up, perhaps none is more curious than that pre- 

 sented by the Post-glacial cavern deposits. We may 

 close our survey of this period with the exploration 

 of one of these strange repositories; and may select 

 Kent's Hole at Torquay, so carefully excavated and 

 illumined with the magnesium light of scientific in- 

 quiry by Mr. Pengelly and a committee of the British 

 Association. 



The somewhat extensive and ramifying cavern of 

 Kent's Hole is an irregular excavation, evidently 

 due partly to fissures in limestone rock, and partly to 

 the erosive action of water enlarging such fissures 

 into chambers and galleries. At what time it was 

 originally cut we do not know, but it must have 

 existed as a cavern at the close of the Pliocene or 

 beginning of the Post-pliocene period, since which 

 time it has been receiving a series of deposits which 

 have quite filled up some of its smaller branches. 



First and lowest, according to Mr. Pengelly, is a 

 "breccia," or mass of broken and rounded stones, 

 with hardened red clay filling the interstices. Most of 

 the stones are of the rock which forms the roof and 

 walls of the cave, but many, especially the rounded 

 ones, are from more distant parts of the surrounding 

 country. In this mass, the depth of which is un- 

 known, are numerous bones, all of one kind of animal, 

 the cave bear, a creature which seems to have lived in 

 Western Europe from the close of the Pliocene down 

 to the modern period. It must have been one of the 



