» 8 9*-93.] 555 



in the chalk rocks all round our shore in Antrim. We have 

 also caves in the trap rocks at Ballycastle and Ballintoy, and at 

 Torr Head we have extensive caves in the Primary rocks. The 

 caves at Cushendun are in red conglomerate. Many caves in 

 various parts of the world are very extensive, and have become 

 places of special interest to travellers and tourists because 

 of their strange position, great extent, and often fantastic 

 natural embellishments. Primitive man, no doubt, resorted 

 to many of them as places of retreat and shelter, which 

 he shared with the wild animals, whose remains are now 

 found so abundantly in the cavern deposits, and demonstrate 

 that man and the now extinct mammalia were contemporary, 

 and that the earlier cavern contents were accumulated under 

 climatic conditions similar to what prevailed during the 

 formation of the river-drift. But because of their more 

 gradual accumulation, and because man must have occupied 

 the caves for long periods, such caves yield a much greater 

 variety of worked flints, and a greater variety of animal 

 remains, than the river-gravels, indicating step by step the slow 

 development of human culture. We have in the cavern deposits 

 the accumulation of the very earliest times, and a continuance 

 of them to within the Historic period ; we are thereby furnished 

 with a connection between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic 

 stages of flint manufacture, although some scientific observers 

 maintain that there was a distinct break between the former and 

 the later stages.* 



In Ireland, we have no deposits or remains equivalent to the 

 true Palaeolithic stage, although the worked flints found in the 

 raised beaches, and marine gravels of Antrim and Down, 

 approximate in some cases to the forms which in England and 

 on the continent are unquestionably attributed to the Palaeolithic 

 stage. The worked flints of such gravels as Ballyholme, Cultra, 

 Holywood, Kilroot, Larne, Carnlough, and Cushendun, are all 

 rudely chipped and unpolished, and so far conform to the 

 characteristics of the true Palaeolithic type,t but the absence of 



* See " Reliquiae Aquitanicae," edited by T. Rupert Jones, F.R.S. 

 f See a paper by J. H. Staple in Report B.N.F.C. for 1869. 



