64 REPORT— 1M77. 



ham, on the other hand, his relies of all lands amounted to no more than 8 - 5 per 

 cent, of all the osseous remains, whilst those of the Bear rose to 53 per cent. 



3rd. The entrances of Brixham Cavern were completely filled up and its history 

 suspended not later than the end of the Palaeolithic era. Nothing occurred within 

 it from the days when Devonshire was occupied by the Cave and Grizzly Bears, 

 Reindeer, Rhinoceros, Cave Lion, Mammoth, and Man, whose best tools were un- 

 polished flints, until the quarryrnau broke into it early in a.d. 1858. Kent's Cavern, 

 on the contrary, seems to have never been closed, never unvisited by Man, from 

 the earliest Palaeolithic times to our own, with the possible exception of the Neo- 

 lithic era, of which it cannot be said to have yielded any certain evidence. 



Though my History of Cavern Exploration in Devonshire is now completed, so 

 far as the time at my disposal will allow, and so far as the materials are at present 

 ripe for the historian, I venture to ask your further indulgence for a few brief 

 moments whilst passing from the region of Fact to that of Inference. 



That the Kent s-IIole men of the Hyaenine period — to say nothing at present of 

 their predecessors of the Breccia — belonged to the Pleistocene times of the Biologist, 

 is seen in the fact that they were contemporary with Mammals peculiar to, and 

 characteristic of, those times. This contemporaneity proves them to have belonged 

 to the Paleolithic era of Britain and "Western Europe generally, as defined by the 

 Archaeologist ; and this is fully confirmed by their unpolished tools of flint and 

 chert. That they were prior to the deposition of even the oldest part of the Peat 

 Bogs of Denmark, with their successive layers of Beech, Pedunculated Oak, Sessile 

 Oak, and Scotch Fir, we learn from the facts that even the lowest zone of the bogs has 

 yielded no bones of mammals but those of recent species, and no tools but those of 

 Neolithic type ; whilst even the Granular Stalagmite, the uppermost of the Hyaenine 

 beds in Kent's Hole, has afforded relics of Mammoth, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, Cave 

 Bear, and Cave Hyaena. 



That the men of the Cave Breccia, or Ursine period, to whom we now turn, were 

 of still higher antiquity is obvious from the geological position of their industrial 

 remains. That the two races of Troglodytes were separated by a wide interval of 

 time we learn from the sheet of Crystalline Stalagmite, sometimes 12 feet thick, 

 laid down after the deposition of the Breccia had ceased, and before the introduc- 

 tion of the Cave-earth had begun, as well as from the entire change in the materials 

 composing the two deposits. But, perhaps, the fact which most emphatically in- 

 dicates the chronological value of this interval is the difference in the faunas. In 

 the Cave-earth, as already stated, the remains of the Hyaena greatly exceed in 

 number those of any other mammal ; and it may be added that he is also disclosed 

 by almost every relic of his contemporaries — their jaws have, through his agency, 

 lost their condyles and lower borders ; their bones are fractured after a fashion 

 known by experiment to be his ; and the splinters into which they are broken are 

 deeply scored with his teeth-marks. His presence is also attested by the abundance 

 of his droppings in every branch of the Cavern. In short, Kent's Hole was one of 

 his homes ; he dragged thither, piecemeal, such animals as he found dead near it ; 

 and the well-known habits of his representatives of our day have led us to expect 

 all this from him. "When, however, we turn to the Breccia a very different spec- 

 tacle awaits us. W T e meet with no trace whatever of his presence, not a single 

 relic of his skeleton, not a bone on which he has operated, not a coprolite to mark 

 as much as a visit. Can it be doubted that had he then occupied our country ho 

 would have taken up his abode in our Cavern ? Need we hesitate to regard this 

 entire absence of all traces of so decided a cave-dweller as a proof that he had not 

 yet made his advent in Britain ? Are we not compelled to believe that Man formed 

 part of the Devonshire fauna long before the Hyaena did ? Is there any method of 

 escaping the conclusion that between the era of the Breccia and that of the Cave- 

 earth it was possible for the Hyaena to reach Britain ? — in other words, that the 

 last continental state of our country occurred during that interval ? I confess that, 

 in the present state of the evidence, I see no escape ; and that the conclusion thus 

 forced on me compels me to believe also that the earliest men of Kent's Hole were 

 inter (jlacial, if not prec/lacial. 



