ON THE CAE GWYN CAVE. 133 



the cave which had yielded to subterranean denudation and gradu- 

 ally crumbled down or collapsed more rapidly. Dr. Geikie, who 

 visited the cave in October, quite concurred in this view (see 

 p. 118). 



So the bone-earth which was said to occur 4 feet beyond the 

 entrance to the cave was really all within the original cave before 

 this portion of it had fallen in. 



It was impossible that this could be an ancient mouth of a cave 

 round wliich talus from the rock above had accumulated, and that 

 the sea had afterwards crept over it and deposited the marine drift 

 upon it, because the great angular blocks occurred at various levels 

 in the clayey and sandy debris, and the drift was crushed in upon 

 some of the fallen masses so as to stand vertically, with the included 

 fragments arranged as described above in the case of the drift in the 

 quarry on the other side of the gallery, where also it has sunk into 

 fissures and caves of the limestone. 



The same thing has happened here also in the case of the Cae 

 Gwyn Cave (as shown in figs. 2 and 4). The pebbles stood with 

 their longer axes vertical, and the bed of grey clay was even a little 

 reversed in places. The inclination of the beds decreased through 

 about 4 feet of angular limestone and overlying sand and loam till 

 the drift by degrees resumed its almost horizontal position. 



in the lower right-hand corner of the sketch, fig. 2, close to the 

 right foot of the right-hand man, the fiake was found ; it was under 

 some overhanging rock, which had to be removed in the progress of 

 the work, and was overlain by great masses of limestone. The 

 deposit in which it occurred was a slightly sandy, red, sticky clay, 

 like the earthy residuum of the limestone, with a little more sandy 

 material washed in from the drift, and resembling rather the mate- 

 rial that filled the fissures than the stratified cave-deposits. 



This satisfactorily explains some difficulties connected with the 

 flake; for instance, the curious fact that, although many flints 

 were found in the bone-earth, their surface was in a very different 

 state from that of the flake. It also explains the position of the 

 flake, which was tucked into a corner far inside the recesses of the 

 cave, instead of, as is mostly the case, somewhere near the entrance ; 

 for it has been shown that this upper opening was not an entrance 

 during the period of occupation of the cave. 



The flake is considered by Dr. John Evans * and Mr. Worthington 

 Smith t to be of a late palaeolithic type, if not newer still, and if it 

 did occur in the true bone-earth it would go far to prove that the 

 bone-earth is postglacial, whereas if it did not occur in the true 

 cave-deposits (as distinguished from the swallow-hole importations) 

 aU evidence of the existence of man in this cave falls to the ground. 

 It is more probable that the flake was carried in much later times 

 into the position in which it was found. The Zonites had reached a 

 still lower level, where it lay, not far off, in clay identical with that 



* Quart. Journ. Geo]. Soc. vol. xlii. p. 11. 

 t ' Nature,' vol. xxxvii. Nov. 3, 1887, p. 7. 



