1862.] DAWKINS HY^NA-DEN. 119 



America, and in the possession of Dr. Acland*. The chert arrow- 

 head is dissimilar to any that I have seen. A splinter, which is 

 bounded on one side by a straight cutting edge, appears to me to 

 have been used as a knife, and to have been intentionally chipped 

 into its present form for that purpose. 



But what inference can be drawn from these signs of Man's 

 presence in a Hyaena-den filled with unmistakeable remains of a 

 fauna now extinct in Europe ? Was the fabricator a contemporary 

 of the British Cave-bear, Ehinoceros, Mammoth, and their congeners? 

 Or did he leave his implements in the cave at a time posterior to that 

 of the other creatures whose remains are associated with them in the 

 Post-glacial period ? If the former be answered in the affirmative, 

 Man, instead of having appeared on the earth some 6000 or 7000 

 years ago, must have existed at a time anterior to the glacial epoch f, 

 and at a time when the relations between land and water were alto- 

 gether different, — a period that we cannot sum up in years. But 

 if the latter, the great antiquity of the implements is by no means 

 proved, and they may have belonged to any period anterior to that 

 of the Saxons. The facts of the case, to my mind at least, lead but 

 to one conclusion — that these implements were deposited in the cave 

 during the Preglacial period. The cave at the time of its discovery 

 (assuming the statement of the workmen to be true) was completely 

 blocked up, so that the ravine-side presented no concavity to indicate 

 its presence ; there were no traces of disturbance posterior to the 

 filling up of the cave either on the spot where they were found, or 

 as we were driving our adit thither. And, as 12 feet of the former 

 mouth of the cave have been cut away, we must double the distance 

 from the present entrance to the spot itself, which will thus be 24 

 feet. The motive certainly has yet to be assigned that would induce 

 a savage to excavate a trench 24 feet long with his miserable stone 

 implements, and consequently with great labour ; and, having exca- 

 vated it, again to fill it up to the very roof with the debris which he 

 had removed — earth, stones, and animal remains. The absence of 

 charcoal, pottery, and human bones precludes the idea of the cave 

 ever having been a place of sepulture, as was the cave close by, also 

 one on the northern flank of the Mendips at Burrington-Comb, and 

 a third in Cheddar Chfi's J. 



But, on the other hand, it may be said that the fact of their being 

 found in and around the same spot is a weighty argument in favour 

 of their introduction in the Post-glacial times. Had they been sub- 

 jected to violent watery action, they would, like most of the animal 

 remains, have been scattered confusedly through the matrix, and 



* The chert of which some of these implements are made appears to have been 

 derived from the Greensand series of Blackdown. 



t In making use of the terms Preglacial, Grlacial, and Post-glacial, I have 

 followed Phillips's division of the Pleistocene. ( Vide Phillips's Manual of Geo- 

 logy, p. 408.) 



I Vide Buckland's ' Reliquiae Diluvianag,' p. 164. In one cave in this Comb 

 Dr. Buckland found human bones encrusted with stalagmite ; in another, about 

 two years ago (1859), I discovered numerous fragments of charcoal, and one of 

 the sternal bones of Canis lupus mixed with numerous shells of Helix. 



