5A REPORT— 1868. 
Up to this time, the Rock-like Breccia has been utterly silent on the ques- 
tion of the existence of Man; it has given up no tools or chips of flint or 
bone, no charred wood or bones, no bones split longitudinally, no stones sug- 
gesting that they had been used as hammers or crushers. But whilst they 
have before them the lessons so emphatically taught by their exploration 
of the Cavern, the Committee cannot but think that it would be premature 
to draw, at present, any inference from this negative fact. 
In the Western Division of the South-west Chamber, the very difficult 
exploration of which is now in progress, the thickness of the Stalagmitic 
Floor surpassed everything previously met with. Up to this time it has 
averaged more than 7 feet, in two instances only and over very limited spaces 
it was so little as 3 feet, and it has reached so much as 123 feet. 
Cave-earth presented itself at the northern end of each section in the first 
seven foot-parallels only, where it was rapidly thinning out, both southwards 
and westwards. It was covered with its own Modern Floor of Stalagmite, 
and rested on the Older Floor of the same material, beneath which lay the 
Rock-like Breccia. This, so far as is at present known, was the termination 
of that great deposit of Cave-earth which, in unbroken continuity, has been 
followed from the entrances of the Cavern, which has yielded so many 
thousands of bones of extinct animals, and at least hundreds of Man’s flint 
and bone implements and their concomitant chips, and which in other still 
larger branches of the Cavern awaits exploration. It will be shortly seen 
that to the last it was true to its character. 
As in this Division the Modern Floor rested at once on the Older one and 
assumed a crystalline structure, especially beyond the line at which the Cave- 
earth disappeared, it is sometimes not easy to say how much of the great 
thickness just spoken of is to be ascribed to the period which separated the 
era of the Rock-like Breccia from that of the comparatively modern Cave- 
earth, and how much to the time which has elpased since the introduction 
of the latter deposit terminated. 
In the upper part of this enormous accumulation some examples of charred 
wood have been found; and several stalactites, which no doubt had dropped 
from the roof above, have been met with lodged in the mass. There are a 
few peculiarities in the structure of this Stalagmite which have not been 
noticed elsewhere. It sometimes has a honeycombed or cellular structure, 
and in other places it is traversed in various directions by a series of tubular 
cavities, both of which have greatly contributed to the difficulty which the 
workmen have experienced in breaking it up; for whilst the cavities do not 
appear to diminish the strength of the mass, they allow the ignited gun- 
powder room to expand, and thus render it almost impossible to excavate it 
by blasting. When it is added that the Stalagmite is not traversed by great 
divisional planes, as almost all rocks are, and that it nearly fills the Chamber 
to the roof, it will be seen that at present, at least, the exploration requires 
very pertinacious and skilful labour. 
It has been already stated that but few flint implements were found in 
the Lecture Hall, that these were much inferior to those brought to the 
Association in previous years from other parts of the Cavern, and that the 
Eastern Division of the South-west Chamber yielded a few chips only. It 
was, perhaps, not unreasonable to ascribe this paucity to the comparative 
remoteness of the branches of the Cavern in which the researches have been 
carried on during the year 1867-68. Be this as it may, the Superintendents 
had but little hope or expectation that better fortune was awaiting them so 
long as the work was day by day carrying them further on in the same 
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