334 A Geological Problem. [July, 



art " in Kent's Cavern, of which the former spoke, were 

 purely hypothetical, and invented solely in defence of a 

 foregone conclusion. Dr. Buckland's knowledge of the 

 phenomena of the cavern was entirely derived from the re- 

 searches of other persons, chiefly the Rev. Mr. MacEnery, 

 who spent several years in the exploration of Kent's Hole, 

 and declined the acceptance of the hypothesis, as the 

 following passage shows; — " Dr. Buckland is inclined to 

 attribute these flints to a more modern date by supposing 

 that the ancient Britons had scooped out ovens in the 

 stalagmite, and that through them the knives got ad- 

 mission to the diluvium Without stopping 



to dwell on the difficulty of ripping up a solid floor, which, 

 notwithstanding the advantage of undermining and the 

 exposure of its edges, still defies all our efforts, though 

 commanding the apparatus of the quarry, I am bold to 

 say that in no instance have I discovered evidence of 

 breaches or ovens in the floor, but one continuous plate 

 of stalagmite diffused uniformly over the loam."* 



The late Colonel Hamilton Smith devoted a section of 

 his "National History of the Human Species" (1848), 

 to the question of " Bones of Man among Organic Remains," 

 of which the following is a brief summary : — In a conver- 

 sation with the author in 1824, Cuvier admitted that the 

 opinions then in vogue on the point would require con- 

 siderable modification. Donati, Germer, Rasoumouski, 

 and Guetard, maintained that human bones had been found 

 intermixed with those of lost species of mammals in several 

 places ; they had been detected in England in caves and 

 fissures ; they were found at Meissen in Saxony, and at 

 Durford in France, by M. Firmas. A fossilised skeleton 

 found in the schist at Quebec, and in part preserved at the 

 seminary, excited no attention ; and the well-known Guada- 

 loupe skeletons had been pronounced recent upon hypo- 

 thetical reasoning. Those discovered by M. Schmerling in 

 the Liege caverns were similarly disposed of, and Dr. 

 Lund's reports respecting partially petrified human bones, 

 found by him in the interior of Brazil, in the same con- 

 dition with those of numerous animals now extinct, which 

 accompanied them, attracted no more than incredulous 

 attention. In the caverns of Bize, in France, human bones 

 and shreds of pottery were found in red clay mixed with the 

 debris of extinct mammalia ; a similar collocation was soon 

 after detected by M. de Serres, in the caverns of Pondres 



* See Trans. Devon. Assoc, vol. iii., p. 334, 1869. 



