DRIFTS OF THE YALE OF CLWYD. 



115 



There have been many previous attempts to prove the occurrence 

 of remains of Man in Miocene, Pliocene, and Glacial beds ; and 

 before this it has been contended that certain cave-deposits were of 

 preglacial age, because a mass of clay with boulders blocked the 

 mouth — for instance, in the Victoria Cave near Settle, where a 

 large group of animals, such as occur elsewhere along with Man, 

 were found in beds overlapped by boulder-clay which had sealed up 

 the mouth of the cave. It was at one time supposed, from wrong 

 determination of a very obscure fragment, that a fibula of Man 

 himself had been found among them ; and well there might have 

 been, for they were palaeolithic animals. I organized the committee 

 for the exploration of this cave, and watched the excavation at 

 intervals from its commencement, so I had every opportunity of 

 forming an opinion as to the age and mode of formation of the 

 deposits ; and " I hold that as the cliff fell back by wet or frost, and 

 limestone fragments fell over the cave-mouth, with them also came 

 masses of clay, which since the glacial times had laid in hollows in 

 the rock above. We dug and found such there, and, more, I 

 observed that the clay lay across the mouth, as though it had thus 

 fallen, and not as if it came direct from glacial ice that pushed its 

 way athwart the crag in which the cave occurs. It seemed to have 

 fallen obliquely from the side where the fissured rock more readily 

 yielded to atmospheric waste, so that it somewhat overlay the part 

 immediately above the cave. On the inside the muddy water which 

 collected after flood, held back by all this clay, filled every crevice 

 and the intervals between the fallen limestone rock, while still 

 outside was the open talus of angular fragments known as screes "*. 



Mutatis mutandis, we have the same story over again at Ffynnon 

 Beuno. 



Man followed hard on the receding glaciers ; but before the ice 

 filled our valleys there is as yet no evidence that Man had visited 

 the north-western part of Europe or our island, if it was an island 

 then. 



I do not for a moment deny the possibility or even probability 

 of our some day finding a cave which was formed before the great 

 St.-Asaph-drift submergence, or even before the Great Snowdonian 

 ice rode over the Vale of Clwyd on to the Cheshire plains ; but such 

 caves will be few, and their age hard to prove, for many will have 

 been altogether destroyed by denudation, or will have got swilled 

 out by marine and subaerial currents, and no trace of their first 

 inhabitants will have been left. The question is one of such great 

 interest that we are justified in asking for very clear evidence in 

 each case in which it is stated that human remains of great antiquity 

 have been found in caves. 



* Victoria Inst,, March 1879. 



