802 W. Pengelly—Cavern Exploration in Devonshire. 
mammoth was certainly found at Oreston in 1858; and, unless 
I am greatly in error, remains of Rhinoceros tichorhinus were 
also met with there, and lodged by me in the British Museum. 
It may be added that the skull and other relics of a hog were 
exhumed on that occasion, and now belong to my collection. 
There was nothing to suggest that the cavern had been the 
home of the hyzena; and whilst I fully accept Dr. Buckland’s 
opinion that animals had fallen into the open fissures and there 
rished, and that the remains had subsequently been washed 
thence into the lower vaultings (‘‘ Relig. Dil.,” 2d ed., 1834, p. 
78), I venture to add that some of the animals may have 
retired thither to die; a few may have been dragged or pursued 
there by beasts of prey; whilst rains, such as are not quite 
unknown in Devonshire in the present day, probably washed 
in some of the bones of such as died near at hand on the adja- 
cent plateau. Nothing appears to have been met with sugges- 
tive of human visits. 
Kent's Hole—About a mile due east from Torquay harbor 
and half a mile north from Torbay there is a small wooded 
limestone hill, the eastern side of which is, for the uppermost 
thirty feet, a vertical cliff, having at its base, and fifty-four feet 
apart, two apertures leading into one and the same vast cavity 
in the interior of the hill, known as Kent’s Hole or Cavern. 
These openings are about 200 feet above mean sea-level, and 
from them the hill slopes rapidly to the valley at its foot, at a 
level of from sixty to seventy feet below. : 
There seems to be neither record nor tradition of the dis- 
covery of the cavern. Richardson, in the 8th edition of “A 
Tour through the Island of Great Britain,” published in 1778, 
speaks of it as “ perhaps the greatest natural curiosity” in the 
county. Its name occurs on a map dated 1769; it is mentioned 
in a lease 1659; visitors cut their names and dates on the 
stalagmite from 1571 down to the present century; judging 
from numerous objects found on the floor, it was visited by 
man through medizeval back to pre-Roman times; and, unless 
the facts exhumed by explorers have been misinterpreted, it 
was a human home during the era of the mammoth and his 
contemporaries, 
In 1824 Mr. Northmore, of Cleve, near Exeter, was led to 
make a few diggings in the cavern, and was the first to find 
fossil bones there. Ie was soon followed by Mr. (now Sir) W. 
C. Trevelyan, who not only found bones, but had a plate of 
them engraved. In 1825, the Rev. J. MacKnery, an Irish 
Roman Catholic priest residing in the family of Mr. Cary, of 
Tor Abby, Torquay, first visited the cavern, when he, too, 
found teeth and bones, of which he published a plate. Soon 
after, be made another visit, accompanied by Dr. Buckland, 
