36 Mr. R. J. Lssher on 



with bones that had been roasted, and bone tools, an awl, a 

 harpoon, a fish-spear, and a needle of bone. With these were 

 bones of hyasna, rhinoceros, horse, ox, and deer. Here was the 

 home of those ancient hunters who lived in England with the 

 hyasna, the mammoth, and the rhinoceros, and who used flint 

 weapons, which they manufactured round this fireplace. 



The next deposit, which extended throughout the cave, was 

 a reddish cave earth, and it yielded the greatest store of animal 

 remains. They represented hyasna, horse, woolly rhinoceros, 

 mammoth or woolly elephant, Irish elk, reindeer, red deer, 

 lion, and other animals, some of which exist at the present day, 

 while others are long since extinct. Among the relics of the 

 latter were some teeth of the machairodus, or sabre-toothed 

 lion, whose upper canine teeth were of enormous size and 

 serrated. It was a very ancient and pliocene animal. Hyaenas 

 appear from their numerous bones to have been very abundant, 

 and some of the others, as the reindeer, were suited for life in 

 Arctic countries. But, besides the beasts of prey, human in- 

 habitants — doubtless a race of hunters — lived there at times. 

 They probably lighted large fires near the cave's mouth, where 

 the black band occurred, to keep out the wild beasts during 

 their stay. The objects these hunters left behind them were 

 chiefly spear heads of flint, carefully chipped into shape with great 

 labour, as is still done by some savage nations. Carved bone 

 harpoons were also found in the cave earth, and a bone pin, 

 which was in contact with the tooth of a rhinoceros. 



But there was an older chapter still in the history of Kent's 

 cave. Another stalagmite floor lay beneath the cave earth, 

 crystalline in structure, which showed its greater age, and it 

 attained in places twelve feet in thickness. 



The lowest deposit, which lay under the crystalline stalagmite, 

 was a dark-red sandy paste in places, but was often found in 

 masses of rocklike hardness, and was called the Breccia. It 

 was largely composed, not of limestone fragments, but of pieces 

 of red grit, a rock which is not to be found in the cavern-hill, 

 but in hills now separated from it by a valley seventy feet deep 



