514 Notices of Memoirs — W. Pengelly — Bench Cave, Brixham. 



I. — Kecent Eeseakches in Bench Cavern, Brixham, Devon. 



By William Pengelly, F.E.S., F.G.S., etc. 



AS long ago as 1839 the workmen in a limestone quarry on the 

 southern shore of Torbay, and adjacent to the town of Brixham, 

 laid bare at the back of the quarry the greater part of a vertical 

 dvke composed of red earth and angular pieces of limestone. The 

 quarrying operations, then discontinued, were resumed in 1861, when 

 the entire dyke was disclosed, and among the materials of an 

 incoherent part of it which fell down, were found some hundreds of 

 osseous remains, including skulls, jaws, teeth, vertebrae, portions of 

 horns, bones, and pieces of bones, identified by Mr. W. A. Sanford, 

 F.G.S., as relics of the Cave-Hygena, Wolf, Fox (2 species). Bear, 

 Wild Bull, Reindeer, Hare, and Arvicola (2 species). The Hyaena 

 was by very much the most prevalent form ; but there was nothing 

 indicating that he found a habitual home there. Not a coprolite was 

 met with, nor was there a single bone scored with his teeth-marks, 

 or broken after any of his well-known modes. The entire absence 

 of anything betokening the existence of man was equally marked. 

 It must be remembered, however, that the finds then met with were 

 all from a mass of heterogeneous material which had filled a fissure 

 nowhere more than two feet wide, and in places not more than a 

 very few inches — not from a cavern in the proper sense of that term. 

 Adjacent to the left bottom corner of the dyke was the mouth of 

 a low narrow tunnel, having a floor of stalagmite and extending 

 into the hill to an unknown distance, but certainly upward of 30 

 feet. The proprietor of the quarry declined to allow any scientific 

 investigations to be made, stating that he meant to make such 

 researches himself; but this was never done. 



In September, 1885, Mr. W. Else, Curator of the Museum of the 

 Torquay Natural History Society, obtained permission from the 

 gentlemen into whose hands the property had passed, to make such 

 explorations as he might find desirable both in the dyke and in the 

 tunnel ; and from that date he has spent on the work all the odds 

 and ends of time he has been able to command. His more recent 

 researches have been mainly carried on in the tunnel, where he 

 found the stalagmite floor, from 6 to 12 inches thick, formed on 

 a reddish cave-earth, having a maximum thickness of 14 inches, and 

 lying on a continuous limestone basis. Beyond a few remains of 

 Hysena nothing of interest occurred in the stalagmite, but the con- 

 tents of the cave-earth were more numerous and interesting. In 

 July, 1887, 24 specimens of bone selected from Mr. Else's finds — 

 21 being from the cave-earth in the tunnel and 3 from the dyke — 

 were forwarded for identification to Mr. E. T. Newton, of the Geolo- 

 gical Survey of England, who at the end of a very few days 

 returned them with a list containing not only the names of the 

 species to which they belong, but also those of the bones themselves. 

 Of the 21 from the 'tunnel one is a relic of a Fox, while all the 



