362 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
present, with the exception of the Meetings of 1860 and 1870 
only, the President of this Section has delivered an Address. 
None of the local geological papers read in 1841 appear to have 
attracted so much attention as those on Lithodomous Perforations, 
Raised Beaches, Submerged Forests, and Caverns (see ‘Atheneum’ 
for 7th to 28th of August, 1841); and, as an effort to connect the 
present with the past, I have decided upon taking up one of these 
threads, and devoting the remarks I have now to offer to the History 
of Cavern-Exploration in Devonshire. I am not unmindful that 
there were giants in those days; and no one can deplore more than 
I do our loss of Buckland and De la Beche, amongst many others ; 
nor can I forget the enormous strides opinion has made since 
1841, when, in this Section, Dr. Buckland “ contended that human 
remains had never been found under such circumstances as to prove 
their contemporaneous existence with the Hyznas and Bears of the 
caverns ;” and added that “in Kent’s Hole the Celtic knives.... 
were found in holes dug by art, and which had disturbed the floor 
of the cave and the bones below it” (‘ Atheneum,’ 14th Aug. 1841, 
p-626). This scepticism, however, did the good service of inducing 
cavern explorers to conduct their researches with an accuracy which 
should place their results, whatever they might prove to be, amongst 
the undoubted additions to human knowledge. 
The principal caverns in South Devon occur in the limestone 
districts of Plymouth, Yealmpton, Brixham, Torquay, Buckfast- 
leigh, and Chudleigh ; but as those in the last two localities have 
yielded nothing of importance to the anthropologist or the pale- 
ontologist, they will not be further noticed on this occasion. In 
dealing with the others it seems most simple to follow mainly the 
order of chronology; that is to say, to commence with the cavern 
which first caught scientific attention, and, having finished all that 
the time at my disposal will] allow me to say about it, but not before, 
to proceed to the next, in the order thus defined; and so on through 
the series. 
Oreston Caverns.—When Mr. Whidbey engaged to superintend 
the construction of thé Plymouth Breakwater, Sir Joseph Banks, 
President of the Royal Society, requested him to examine narrowly 
any caverns he might meet with in the limestone-rock to be quarried 
at Oreston, near the mouth of the River Plym, not more than two 
miles from the room in which we are assembled, and have the bones 
or any other fossil remains that were met with carefully preserved 
