114 PROF. T, il'KEXNY HrGHES 



the district, I made a few remarks on the Ffynnon Beuno Caves, 

 which appear thus in the report: — 



" They found another kind of deposit in a cave nearer to Tre- 

 meirchion. There were recent deposits in it, and recent animals 

 ... (to wit a black sheep), but at the end there was a deposit of 

 that brownish earth commonly known as cave- earth, in which they 

 found the remains of the sheep of earlier days. In ancient times 

 the remains of stags would be found there, and in still more ancient 

 times those of hyaena, and of other animals of that time which the 

 hyaenas found in the woods below and dragged in there .... If 

 permission could be obtained, he proposed to visit that cave some 

 day with the members .... perhaps they would find the remains 

 of primaeval man, and certainly some of the extinct animals." The 

 bone-earth had been disturbed by mining trials along the fissures 

 which had determined the position of the caves, and thus fragments 

 of bone from the lower cave-deposits were lying on the surface. 

 The only recognizable remains found on that occasion belonged to 

 Bos and Hyaena. 



In the following month Dr. Hicks partially explored these caves, 

 and made a further examination of them in the autumn of the next 

 year. He gave the results of his investigations in an interesting paper 

 read before the Geologists' Association in K'ov. 1884 *. He notices 

 the dissimilarity in the character of much of the material which had 

 apparently filled these caverns before they were explored and that 

 with which he was conversant in those of South Wales, pointing 

 out that it is identical in appearance with the upper Boulder-clay 

 in this area, especially that about St. Asaph, and that it contains 

 the same derived boulders. The bones, he adds, are in disturbed 

 positions, and filled by material unlike that in which they now lie. 

 In this earth, associated with bones of reindeer, a flint flake was 

 found, respecting which he quotes the opinion of Dr. Evans that it 

 is of the La Madelaine or newest palaeolithic type. Dr. Hicks 

 explains that the flake, like the bones, was " evidently not in its 

 original position, but had been disturbed by water-action and had 

 been carried there from some other point in the cavern " — a fact of 

 considerable importance undoubtedly, as it showed that the dis- 

 turbance of the cave-deposits which he observed there was later 

 than the reindeer age. 



At the meeting of the British Association at Aberdeen f, Dr. 

 Hicks read a paper on these caves, in which he gave some further 

 details as to the character and mode of occurrence of the deposits. 

 In the first sentence of the first paragraph in his description of the 

 Cae Gwyn Cave, where he says that " all the deposits were entirely 

 undisturbed, except by burrowing animals, when we first discovered 

 it," he means, of course, that the deposits had not been disturbed by 

 man, because a few lines lower down he off'ers reasons for believing 

 " that the water-action which disturbed the original materials in the 



* Proc. Geol. Assoc, vol. ix. 1885, p. 1. 



t Eep. Brit. Assoc. Aberdeen, 1885, Trans, Sect. C, p. 1021 ; Geol. Mag. 

 1885, dec. 3, vol. iii. p. 510. 



