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specimens of carnivora, to which Kent's Cavern served as a 
den or a sepulchre. Professor Owen considers that to the 
great extinct tiger, bear, and hyaena, of the caves, was 
assigned the office of controlling the members of the richly- 
developed order of the herbivorous mammalia, and that with 
them was associated in the work a feline animal, as large as 
the tiger, and, to judge by its implements of destruction, of 
greater ferocity. From the form of the teeth of this animal, 
each movemeDt of the jaw combined the power of a knife 
and a saw, while the apex, in making the first incision, acted 
like the two-edged point of a sabre. The backward curvature 
of the full-grown teeth enabled them to retain, like barbs, 
the prey whose quivering flesh they penetrated. Of this 
terrific animal, which Professor Owen has named Machairochis 
latidens, Mr. M'Enery discovered several canine teeth in 
Kent's Cavern. The teeth of the fossil hyaena, from the 
same place, proved it to have been larger than the largest 
known species of tiger. The great cave bear, judged by the 
length of his canine teeth, found there by Mr. M'Enery, 
must have equalled the size of a large horse. If man were 
the contemporary of these tremendous animals, he must have 
needed all the advantage which reason gives him to hold 
his own against them, armed only with flint hatchets, spears, 
and arrows. 
But was man really contemporary with them, or with the 
gigantic elks, the Cervus Megaceros and Cervas Strongyloceros, 
whose shed antlers have been found in Kent's Cave, and 
against whom his flint weapons would have had a better 
chance ? From the conflicting statements of Mr. M'Enery 
and Mr. Austen, no decisive conclusion can be arrived at, 
and it would hardly yet be safe to build upon the recent 
discovery of a human jaw in the same gravel with the bones 
of rhinoceros tichorhinus, and ursus spelaeus, in France.* 
* Address of L. Horner, Esq., to the Geological Society, 1861, p. 33. 
