56 REPORT—1868. 
may be worth while to give a brief recapitulation of the facts from the be- 
ginning :— 
1st. The Committee had been at work upwards of five months when 
cuboidal blocks of Stalagmite first appeared in the Cave-earth and in the 
overlying Stalagmitic Floor. After much deliberation, it was concluded that 
they were fragments of an older Floor, which had covered a deposit of still 
higher antiquity, and had been wholly or partially broken up before or during 
the introduction of the Cave-earth in which the blocks were lodged. To this 
conclusion, there was the great objection that there were no bones or stones 
either within or attached to the blocks. 
2nd. After the labour of six further months, during which every day dis- 
interred additional blocks, but with the same negative characters, a large 
portion of an old Floor was actually found zn situ, but without having beneath 
it any trace of a deposit which it had once sealed up. Though the probable 
interpretation was that the deposit had been washed out, or had sunk away 
from the floor through failure of support at its base, it seemed reasonable to 
suppose that, in either case, stones or other remnants of it would be found 
attached to the lower surface of the Floor. Instead of presenting such relics, 
however, this lower surface was a beautiful cream-coloured plate of stalag- 
mite, bristling with short stalactites of the same colour. 
3rd. In order to determine whether the so-called “‘ remnant of old Floor” 
was really stalagmitic throughout, several holes were bored through it, which 
not only decided the question affirmatively, but caused a portion of its nether 
surface to scale off, and to disclose the fact that the “‘ cream-coloured plate” 
was but a modern veneer formed on what had been the original surface ; 
and this, when thus laid bare, proved to be soil-stained and crowded with 
small particles of detrital matter—relics of the missing mechanical deposit. 
4th. After this, seventeen months passed, and though in the meantime 
blocks of stalagmite were found everywhere, and some of them of great size, 
and though the workmen purposely broke them into small pieces, still no 
bone or stone was found within or projecting from them. At length, at the 
end of the time just mentioned, one of them was broken and a bone was 
found within it. After this, ossiferous blocks of stalagmite were dug out 
frequently, and some of them were found to contain stones also. 
5th. Within the compass of another month, loose round lumps of Rock-like 
Breccia were met with in the Cave-earth, and, from their composition and 
external form, were regarded as dislodged remnants of the older deposit which 
had so long been seen by the mind’s eye only. This opinion was strengthened 
by the fact that the bones with which they were crowded did not appear to 
represent precisely the same fauna as did those met with in the Cave-earth. 
6th. At the end of six additional months, the workmen came upon the 
old deposit in situ, having all the characters of the lumps just mentioned, but 
not separated from the Cave-earth above it by any Floor of Stalagmite. 
7th. At the close of a further period of six weeks, or after three full years 
of daily research, there was found, in one and the same vertical section, the 
Old deposit of Breccia capped by its Stalagmite, on which lay the Cave-earth, 
protected, in its turn, by tts Stalagmitic Floor also. The early inference 
from the blocks alone was justified ; not a link of the evidence was missing. 
The entire chain was presented to the eye at one yiew. The case was at 
length complete. 
The following fact may be appropriately mentioned in connexion with this 
case. As has been already stated, a Subcommittee of the Torquay Natural- 
History Society, in 1846, broke through the Modern Stalagmitic Floor in the 
