ON Kent's cavern^ Devonshire. 33 



port, in 1865, to add the new fact that several pieces of burnt bone, as well 

 as a stone having the appearance of a whetstone, and undoiibtedly of distant 

 derivation, had been met with in the cave-earth. Before the end of another 

 twelvemonth, their attention had been arrested by a further phenomenon, 

 and in their Second Report they remarked that " many of the long bones had 

 been split longitudinally," and that it Avas " difficult to suppose that less than 

 human agency could have so divided them." In this, their Third Report, 

 they are able to advance another step, and to record the discovery of bone 

 tools, about the character of which there can be no difference of opinion, 

 which have the mineral condition characteristic of bones found in the deposit 

 they occupied, which occiu'red with the remains of extinct mammals in soil 

 indubitably intact, one of them at the greatest depth to which the excavation 

 has been carried, and all of them beneath a thick unbroken Floor of Stalag- 

 mite, which has itself yielded remains of at least three of the extinct cave- 

 mammals. These successive discoveries, after labours so protracted, are cal- 

 culated to warn us not to place implicit confidence in merely negative evi- 

 dence ; to encourage the hope that the bones of man may yet be exhumed, 

 though probably in sparing numbers only ; and, should this hope be never 

 realized, to justify even the most cautious in holding and avowing the belief 

 that man was, in Devonshire, the contemporary of animals that had become 

 extinct before the times of history or of tradition. 



Again, that Kent's Hole was largely visited in Romano-British times, is 

 testified by numerous and varied objects of that age, foimd in the Black 

 Mould overlying the Stalagmite ; and that the curious frequently made 

 excursions to it during the last century, may be safely inferred from state- 

 ments in the works of the local historians Polwhele and Maton . But waiving 

 this point, and going no further back than the last forty years, it is capable 

 of proof that, within that time, the Cavern was visited by more than ten 

 thousand persons — including not only scientific inquirers, but large pic-nic, 

 dancing, and Bacchanalian parties. All the visitors had to be accompanied 

 by the appointed guide, who was invariably paid for his attendance. The 

 payments were generally made in the Vestibule ; and it might have been 

 expected that, from time to time, money would have been lost, at least, in 

 that part of the Cavern. Jfevertheless, though the Black Mould has been 

 most carefully examined, and has yielded a very large and most miscellaneous 

 collection of objects, it was not until the close of twenty-one months that the 

 labours of the Committee met with a pecuniary reward, in the form of a half- 

 penny of George the Third. Two months afterwards, they had the happiness 

 of finding a sixpence of forty years later date. Besides these, no coin has been 

 met with from the commencement of the work to the present time. 



Further, in their First Report the Committee reminded those who were 

 disposed to attach importance to the fact that man's bones were not forth- 

 coming as readily as his implements, that in the Black Mould, as well as in 

 the Red Loam of the Cavern, the only indications of his existence were rem- 

 nants of his handiwork ; that pottery, implements varying in kind and in 

 material, the remnants of his fires, and the relics of his feasts were numerous, 

 and betokened the lapse of at least two thousand years ; but that there, as 

 well as in the older deposit — the Cave-earth below, — they had met with no 

 vestige of his osseous system. This remained to be their experience, not only 

 when their Second Report was sent in, but up to December last. Then the 

 speU was broken by the discoveiy, in the Black Mould, of part of a human 

 lower jaw containing two molars. This, as has been stated, was followed by 

 the exhumation, fi'om the same deposit, of parts of other jaws, a skull, and 



1867. D 



