SOME ETHNOGRAPHIC PHASES OF CONCHOLOGY. 383 



to the open country along tlie coasts and estuaries, tTie products of 

 the sea, and especially the edible mollusea, formed no unimportant 

 source for their precarious supplier of food. 



Among the interesting illustrations of that common transitional 

 ground on which the geologist and the archgeologist meet, few have 

 attracted greater attention than the celebi^ated Kent's Hole Cave, 

 near Torquay, Devonshire. It has furnished many of the later 

 palseontological specimens which now enrich the collections of the 

 British Museum ; and to its disclosures both Buckland and Owen 

 have acknowledged their obligations for some of their most important 

 data. The roof of the cave is clustered with pendant cones of stalac- 

 tite, and the floor thickly paved with concretions of stalagmite, the 

 accumulations of many centuries. Beneath and embedded in this have 

 been found numerous relics of primitive savage life, intermingled 

 vrith the remains of the rhinoceros, the hyena, and great cave-tiger, 

 felis and hyena spelrsa, the ursus spelcBus or cave bear, along vidth 

 those of other extinct mammals. Among these, though in more 

 superficial deposits, lay traces of the rude culinary practices, illustra- 

 tive of the habits and tastes of the primeval British savage. These 

 are minutely described in the notes of the Rev. J. McEnery, by whom 

 the cave was first explored. Fragments of sun-baked primitive pottery 

 of the rudest description, rounded slabs of slate of a plate-like form, 

 broken and calcined bones, charcoal and ashes, all served to show 

 where the hearth of the old barbarian Briton had stood ; and along 

 with these lay dispersed, flints in all conditions, from the rough pebble 

 as it came out of the chalk, through the various stages of progress, on 

 to the finished spear and arrow-heads and hatchets of flint ; indicating 

 that the ancient British troglodyte had here his workshop as well as 

 his kitchen, and wrought the raw material of his primitive manufac- 

 tures into the requisite tools and weapons of the chase. Other articles, 

 including lance-heads, bodkins, and objects of unascertained uses, — 

 hair-combs or netting tools, — all made of bone, lay amid the accumu- 

 lated chips and splinters of flint and bone ; while nearer the mouth of 

 the cave lay a larger collection of shells of the muscle, limpet, and 

 oyster, indicating that the ancient British aborigines found their pre- 

 carious subsistence from the alternate spoils of the chase and of the sea. 

 Nor were indications wanting of just such applications of the pearly 

 inner luminse of the oyster and other shells for the purposes of orna- 

 ment, as may be observed in the grotesque inlaid carvings of the 



