16 REPORT—1874. 
tion of Brixham Cave’*. It was found in two pieces—the first on the 
12th of August, 1858 ; the second, 40 feet from it, on the 9th of the following 
September ; and it was not until some time after the latter date that the late 
Dr. Falconer discovered that the two fragments fitted each other, and, when 
reunited, formed a massive spear-shaped implement. The lines on the 
Kent’s Cavern implement just described (;74,) show that it had either been 
fractured where it was found, or, what seems more probable, that it is 
traversed by planes of structural weakness, such that a slight blow would 
break it into two or more pieces, which a stream of water would easily 
remove and probably separate, and thus produce a repetition of the Brixham 
case. 
- The Kent’s Cavern tool was found in a small recess in the wall, just 
within the outer or wider entrance of Clinnick’s Gallery, a very few feet 
from the Inscribed Boss of Stalagmite, and, as has been already stated, in 
the fourth foot-level of the Breccia—that is, at the greatest depth in the oldest 
of the Cavern deposits to which the present exploration has been carried ; 
and is thus wonderfully calculated to take the mind step by step back into 
antiquity. 
First, very near the spot occupied by the specimen there rises a vast 
cone of Stalagmite, which an inscription on its surface shows has under- 
gone no appreciable augmentation of volume during the last two and a 
half centuries. 
Second, prior to that was the period spent in rearing the greater portion 
of this cone, which measures upwards of 40 fect in basal girth, reaches a 
height of fully 13 feet, and contains more than 600 cubic feet of stalag- 
mitic matter. 
Third, still earlier was the era during which the Cave-earth was intro- 
duced, in a series of successive small instalments with protracted periods of 
intermittence, when the Cavern was alternately the home of man and of the 
Cave-hyzena, and the latter dragged thither piecemeal so many portions of 
extinct mammals as to convert the Cave into a crowded paleontological 
Museum. 
Fourth, further back still was the period during which the base and 
nucleus of the cone or boss was laid down in the form of Crystalline 
Stalagmite. f 
Fifth, and earliest of all, was the time when materials, not derivable from 
the immediate district, were carried into the Cavern through openings now 
probably choked up, entirely unknown, and the direction in which they lie 
but roughly guessed at—when, apparently, the Cavern-haunting Hyzna had 
not yet arrived in Britain. At an early stage in this earliest era man 
occupied Devonshire ; for prior to the introduction of the uppermost four 
feet of the Breccia one of his massive unpolished tools, rudely chipped 
out of a nodule of chert, found its way into a recess in the Cavern, and 
having a character such as to show that it must have lain undisturbed 
in the same spot until it was detected by a Committee of the British 
Association. 
It may be of service before closing this Report to show, in a tabular form, 
the distribution of the different kinds of Mammals in the Cave-earth in 
various branches of the Cavern. 
* Phil. Trans, vol. clxiii. part 2, pp. 550-551, 
