322 



NATURE 



[Angnsi i6, 1877 



loam, and angular pieces of limestone, forming a coherent wall- 

 like mass, 27 feet high, 12 feet long, 2 feet in greatest thickness, 

 and at its base 123 feet above sea-level. In the face of it lay seve- 

 ral fine relics of the ordinary cave mammals, including an entire 

 left lower jaw of Ilweiia spchca replete with teeth, but which 

 had nevertheless failed to arrest the attention of the incurious 

 workmen who exposed it, or of any one else. 



Soon after the resumption of the work in 186 1, the remnant 

 of the outer wall of the fissure was removed, and caused the fall 

 of an incoherent part of the dyke, which it had previously sup- 

 ported. Amongst the dihris the workmen collected some 

 hundreds of specimens of skulls, jaws, teeth, vertebra, portions 

 of antlers, and bones, but no indications of man. Mr. Wolston, 

 the proprietor, sent some of the choicest specimens to the 

 British Museum, and submitted the remainder to Mr. Ayshford 

 Sanford, F.G.S., from whom I learn that the principal portion 

 of them are relics of the cave hyaena, from the unborn whelp 

 to very aged animals. With them, however, were remains 

 of bear, reindeer, ox, hare, Aivicolo ratlueps, A. agreslis, wolf, 

 fox, and part of a single maxillary with teeth not distinguishable 

 from those of Canis isatis. To this list I may add rhinoceros, 

 of which Mr. Wolston showed me at least one bone. 



From the foregoing undesirably, but unavoidably, brief 

 descriptions, it will be seen that the Devonshire caverns, to 

 which attention has been now directed, belong to two classes, 

 — those of Oreston, the Ash-Hole, and Bench being Fissure 

 Caves : whilst those of Yealm Bridge, Windmill Hill at 

 Brixham, Kent's Hole, and Ansty's Cove are Tunnel Caves. 



Windmill Hill and Kent's Hole Caverns have alone been 

 satisfactorily explored ; and besides them none have yielded 

 evidence of the contemporaneity of man with the extinct cave 

 mammals. 



Oreston is distinguished as the only known British cavern 

 which has yielded remains of Rhinoceros leptorhinus (Quart, 

 Joitrn. Geol. Soc. , xxxvi. p., 456). 



Yealm Bridge Cavern, if we may accept Mr. Bellamy's 

 identification in 1835, '"^^ 'he first in this country in which 

 relics of glutton were found {South Devon Monthlv Museiiin, 

 vi., pp. 21S-223 ; see also "Nat. Hist. S. Devon," 1839, p. Sg). 

 The same species was found in the caves of Somerset and 

 Glamorgan in 1865 (P/cisl. Mam., Pal. Soe., pp. xxi. xxii.), in 

 Kent's Hole in 1869 (Rep. Brit. Assoc., 1869, p. 207), and near 

 PlasHeaton, in North Wales, in l&^o (Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, 

 xxvii., p. 407). 



. Kent's Hole is the only known British cave which has 

 afforded remains of beaver, (Rep. Brit. Assoc, 1869, p. 208), 

 and up to the present year the only one in which the remains of 

 Machairodus latidens had been met with. Indeed Mr. Mac- 

 Enery's statement, that he found in 1S26 five canines and one 

 incisor of this species in the famous Torquay Cavern was held 

 by many paleontologists to be so very remarkable as, at least, 

 to approach the incredible, until the Committee now engaged in 

 the exploration exhumed, in 1872, an incisor of the same 

 species, and thereby confirmed the announcement made by 

 their distinguished predecessor nearly half a century before (Rep. 

 Brit. Assoc., 1872, p. 46). In April last (1877) the Rev. J. M. 

 Mello was able to inform the Geological Society of London 

 that Derbyshire had shared with Devon the honour of having 

 been a home of Machairodus latidens, he having found its 

 canine tooth in Robin Hood Cave in that county, and that 

 there, as in Kent's Hole it was commingled with remains of the 

 cave hyana and his contemporaries (Al>s. Proc. Geol. Soc.,[No. 



334. PP- 3> 4)- 



The Ash Hole, as we have already seen, afforded the first 

 good evidence of a British reindeer. 



In looking at the published reports on the two famous Torbay 

 caverns it will be found that they have certain points of resem- 

 blance as well as some of dissimilarity : — • 



1st. The lowest known bed in each is composed of materials 

 which, whilst they differ in the two cases, agree in being such as 

 may have been furnished by the districts adjacent to the cavern-hills 

 respectively, but not by the hills themselves, and^must have been 

 deposited prior to the existing local geographical conditions. In 

 each, this bed contained flint nnplements and relics of bear, but 

 in neither of them those of hycena. In short, the fourth bed 

 of Windmill Hill Cavern, Brixham, and the breccia of Kent's 

 Hole, Torquay, are coeval, and belong to what I have called the 

 Ursine period of the latter. 



2nd. The beds just mentioned were in each cavern sealed 

 with a sheet of stalagmite, which was partially broken up, and 

 considerable portions of the subjacent beds were dislodged 

 before the introduction of the beds next deposited. 



3rd. The great bone bed, both at Brixham and Torquay, 

 consisted of red clayey loam, with a large percentage of angular 

 fragments of limestone ; and contained flake implements of flint 

 and chert, inosculating with remains of mammoth, the tichorhine 

 rhinoceros, and hyaena. In fine, \h& cave-cartli of Kent's Hole 

 and the third bed of Brixham Cavern correspond in their 

 materials, in their osseous contents, and in their flint tools. 

 They both belong to what I have named the Hyicnme period of 

 the Torquay Cave. 



But, as already stated,; there are points in which the two 

 caverns differ : — 



1st. W'hilst Kent's Hole was the home of man, as well as of 

 the contemporary hycena during the absences of the human 

 occupant, there is no reason to suppose that either man or any 

 of the lower animals ever did more than make occasional visits 

 to Brixham Cave. The latter contained no flint chips, no bone 

 tools, no utilised /'ir/f«-shells, no bits of charcoal, and no 

 coprolites of hyana, all of which occurred in the cave-earth of 

 Kent's Hole. 



2nd. In the Torquay Cave relics of hyaena were much 

 more abundant in the cave-earth than those of any other species. 

 Taking the teeth alone, of which vast numbers were found, 

 those of the hyaena amounted to about 30 per cent, of the 

 entire series, notwithstanding the fact that, compared with most 

 of the cave-mammals, his jaws, when furnished completely, 

 possess but few teeth. At Brixham, on the other hand, his 

 relics of all kinds amounted to no more than 8 '5 per cent, of all 

 the osseous remains, whilst those of the bear rose to 53 per 

 cent. 



3rd. The entrances of Brixham Cavern were completely filled 

 up and its history suspended not later than the end of the 

 Paleolithic era. Nothnig occurred within it from the days when 

 Devonshire was occupied by the cave and grizzly bears, reindeer, 

 rhinoceros, cave lion, mammoth, and man, whose best tools were 

 unpolished flints, until the quarrymen broke into it early in A.D. 

 185S. Kent's Cavern, on the contrary seems to have never been 

 closed, never unvisited by man, from the earliest Pal.i;alithic times 

 to our own, with the possible exception of the Neolithic era, 

 of which it cannot be said to have yielded any certain evidence. 



Though my " History of Cavern Exploration in Devonshire " 

 is now completed, so far as the time at my disposal will allow, 

 and so far as the mateiials are at present ripe for the historian, 

 I venture to ask your further indulgence for a few brief moments 

 whilst passing from the region of fact to that of inference. 



That the Kent's Hole men of the Hyxnine period — to say 

 nothing at present of their predecessors of the Breccia — belonged 

 to the Pleistocene times of the biologist, is seen in the fact that they 

 were contemporary with mammals peculiar to and characteristic 

 of those times. This contemporaneity proves them to have 

 belonged to the Pahvolithic era of Britain and Western Europe 

 generally, as defined by the archa:ologist ; and this is fully 

 confirmed by their unpolished tools of flint and chert. That they 

 were prior to the deposition of even the oldest part of the peat 

 bogs of Denmark, with their successive layers of beech, 

 pedunculated oak, sessile oak, and Scotch fir, we learn from the 

 facts that even the lowest zone of the bogs has yielded no bones 

 of mammals but those of recent species, and no tools but those of 

 Neolithic type ; whilst even the granular stalagmite, the upper- 

 most of the Hyrenine beds in Kent's Hole, has aflbrded relics 

 of mammoth, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, cave bear, and cave 

 hyaena. 



That the men of the Cave Breccia, or Ursine period, to whom 

 we now turn, were of still higher antiquity, is obvious from the 

 geological position of their industrial remains. That the two 

 races of Troglodytes were separated by a wide interval of time 

 we learn from the sheet of crystalline stalagmite, sometimes 

 12 feet thick, laid down after the deposition of the breccia had 

 ceased, and before the introduction of the cave-earth had begun, 

 as well as from the entire change in the materials composing the 

 two deposits. But, perhaps, the fact which most emphatically 

 indicates the chronological value of this interval is the difference 

 in the faunas. In the cave-earth, as already stated, the remains 

 of the hyana greatly exceed in number those of any other 

 mammal ; and it may be added that he is also disclosed by 

 almost every relic of his contemporaries — their jaws have. 



