392 W. Pengelly— Cavern Exploration in Devonshire. . 
to have never been closed, never unvisited by man, from the 
earliest Paleolithic times to our own, with the possible excep- 
tion of the Neolithic era, of which it cannot be said to have 
yielded any certain evidence. 
Though my “ History of Cavern Exploration in Devonshire” 
is now completed, so far as the time at my disposal will allow, 
and so far as the materials are at present ripe for the historian, I 
venture to ask your further indulgence for a few brief moments 
while passing from tlie region of fact to that of inference. 
That the Kent’s Hole men of the Hysnine period—to say 
nothing at present of their predecessors of the Breccia—belonged 
to the Pleistocene times of the biologist, is seen in the fact that 
they were contemporary with mammals peculiar to and charac- 
teristic of those times. This contemporaneity proves them to 
have belonged to the Paleolithic era of Britam and Western 
urope generally, as defined by the archeologist; and this is 
fully confirmed by their unpolished tools of flint and chert. 
That they were prior to the deposition of even the oldest part 
of the peat bogs of Denmark, with their successive layers of 
beech, pedunculated oak, sessile oak, and Scotch fir, we learn 
from the facts that even the lowest zone of the bogs has yielded 
no bones of mammals but those of recent species, and no tools 
but those of Neolithic type; whilst even the granular stalag- 
* mite, the uppermost of the Hyenine beds in Kent’s Hole, has 
afforded relics of mammoth, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, cave bear, 
and cave hyena. 
That the men of the Cave Breccia, or Ursine period, to whom 
we now turn, were of still higher antiquity, is obvious from the 
geological position of their industrial remains. That the two 
races of Troglodytes were separated by a wide interval of time 
we learn from the sheet of crystalline stalagmite, sometimes 
twelve feet thick, laid down after the deposition of the breccia 
ad ceased, and before the introduction of the cave-earth had 
begun, as well as from thé entire change in the materials com- 
posing the two deposits. But, perhaps, the fact which most 
emphatically indicates the chronological value of this interval 
is the difference in the faunas. In the cave-earth, as already 
stated, the remains of the hyena greatly exceed in number 
those of any other mammal; and it may be added that he is 
also disclosed by almost every relic of his contemporaries— 
their jaws have, through his agency, lost their condyles and 
lower borders ; their bones are fractured after a fashion known 
