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Association without realising how great has been his influence in 

 bringing natural knowledge within reach of the people. The 

 museum at Torquay is also an enduring monument to his energy, 

 which will continue to teach when his name is forgotten. 



Pengelly was, however, beyond all other things, a geologist devoted 

 to the study of Devonshire. The collection of Devonian fossils in 

 the Oxford Museum is spoil of his hammer. He collected also the 

 materials for the " Monograph on the Lignite Formation of Bovey 

 Tracey," a joint publication with Dr. Heer, that has thrown so much 

 light on the Miocene forests which clothed the slopes around the 

 Lake of Bovey. During the second quarter of the present century, 

 the question of the antiquity of man was steadily coming to the 

 front. In 1847 Boucher de Perthes published his discovery of flint 

 implements along with the extinct mammalia in the river gravels of 

 Amiens and Abbeville. Similar discoveries in Kent's Hole by Mr. 

 McEnery, made some time between 1825 and 1839, had been verified 

 by Godwin- Austen in 1840 and the Torquay Natural History Society 

 in 1846. So strong, however, were the prejudices against the anti- 

 quity of man that the matter was not thought worthy of further 

 investigation until the year 1858. Then it was determined that a 

 new cave at Brixham, near Torquay, should be explored by a joint 

 committee of the Royal and Geological Societies, consisting, among 

 others, of Lyell, Falconer, Ramsay, Prestvvich, Owen, and Godwin- 

 Austen, with Pengelly as the superintendent of the work. The result 

 of the exploration established, beyond all doubt, the existence of the 

 palaeolithic man in the Pleistocene age, and caused the whole of the 

 scientific world to awake to the fact of the vast antiquity of the 

 human race. From this time Pengelly's energies were mainly 

 directed towards cave exploration. In 1865 he undertook the super- 

 intendence of the exploration of Kent's Hole by a committee of the 

 British Association. Day by day, except when the work was stopped, 

 he visited the cave, and recorded on maps and plans the exact spot 

 where each specimen was found, for no less than sixteen years. The 

 vast collection of palaeolithic implements and fossil bones, each of 

 which bears traces of his handiwork, is represented in most of the 

 museums in this country, and the annual reports, listened, to with so 

 much pleasure by crowds at the meetings of the British Association, 

 are the most complete that have ever been published. It may be 

 objected that the accumulation of so much evidence of the existence 

 of man in the Pleistocene age in the south of England was unneces- 

 sary. It was, however, necessary to sweep away the mass of pre- 

 judice, and this could best be done by repeating the evidence. Had 

 this not been done man would not occupy the recognised position 

 which he now holds in the annals of geology. The rest of Pengelly's 

 life was mainly given up to the researches in the other caves in 



