208 REPORT— 1873. 



fact that the Cavern-hill contains no rock capable of furnishing the mate- 

 rials composing it. Such materials, however, are derivable from loftier adja- 

 cent eminences. 



That these materials were introduced with comparative rapidity is pro- 

 bably indicated by the paucity, to say the least, of angular fragments of 

 limestone, as well as of lilms of stalagmite on the stones or bones, both of 

 which the walls and roof of the cavern would in aU probability have sup- 

 plied during a protracted period. 



That the conditions of the surface of the district adjacent to the cavern 

 must have changed between the period of the Breccia and that of the Cave- 

 earth, is manifest from the fact that such materials as formed the staple of the 

 earlier deposit did not find access daring the later. 



The scantiness of the Cave-earth in the Arcade, aud its immense volume in 

 the eastern division of the cavern, especially in the branches of it into 

 which the external entrances open, as well as those immediately adjacent, 

 indicates that this deposit was derived largely, if not entirely, from external 

 sources, and not from the wasting of the walls and roof of the cavern, since 

 there is no reason to suppose that the rate of disintegration or decomposition 

 would differ so very greatly in the different Chambers and Galleries. It 

 may be worthy of remark, moreover, that, all other things being the same, 

 the thickness or depth of a deposit derived from the waste of the walls and 

 roof of a chamber must be greatest in the narrowest chamber, whilst the re- 

 verse obtains in the present case. 



A glance at the implements from the two deposits shows that they are 

 very dissimilar. Those from the Breccia are much more rudely formed, more 

 massive, have less symmetry of outline, and were made by operating, not on 

 flakes purposely struck off from nodules of flint or chert, as in the case of 

 those from the Cave-earth, but directly on the nodules themselves, all of 

 which appear to have been obtained from accumulations of supracretaceous 

 flint-gravel, such as occur about four miles from the cavern. There seems 

 no doubt, then, that the Breccia men were ruder than those of the Cave- 

 earth ; and this is borne out by the fact that whilst the men represented by 

 the later deposit made bone tools and ornaments — harpoons for spearing fish, 

 eyed needles or bodkins for stitching skins together, awls perhaps to facilitate 

 the passage of the slender needle or bodkin through the tough thick hides, 

 pins for fastening the skins they wore, and perforated Badger's teeth for 

 necklaces or bracelets — nothing of the kind has been found in the Breccia. 

 In short, the stone tools, though both sets were unpolished and coeval 

 with extinct mammals, represent two distinct civilizations. 



It is equally clear that the ruder men were the more ancient ; for their 

 tools were lodged in a deposit which, when the two occurred in the same ver- 

 tical section, was invariably the undermost. In fact the Breccia in which 

 each of the implements was deposited actually had Cave-earth lying on it. 



That the chronological interval separating the two deposits, tools, men, 

 and eras was a great one is indicated by the several facts which have been 

 enumerated. The altered condition of the surface of the adjacent district 

 manifested by the dissimilar mineral and physical characters of the deposits, 

 the sheet of Crystalline Stalagmite which usually separated them and some- 

 times attained a thickness little short of 12 feet, the destruction of great 

 masses of this sheet, the dislodgment of a considerable portion of the Breccia 

 on which it was formed, and the distinctness of the two Cavern-faunai are 

 phenomena very significant of an amount of time incapable of compression 

 within narrow limits. 



