374 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
great, separated the age of Neolithic man from his predecessor 
in the Pleistocene age, — a period in which vast changes, both 
of climate and physical geography, can be shown to have taken 
place ; during this vast interval the separation of Great Britain 
from the continent of Europe took place, and an enormous 
amount of denudation, resulting in the excavation of extensive 
valleys, and the alteration of river-courses, made the England of 
t o-day a very different country from what it was when the Palaeo- 
lithic hunter and the Pleistocene mammalia were reckoned 
amongst its inhabitants. 
During the Pleistocene, as during the later ages, men and 
wild beasts found their homes in the caves of the earth, and it 
is from caves that we have obtained the greatest amount of 
information relating to this most interesting period of the 
world’s history. 
As long ago as the beginning of the present century evidence 
began to be collected which tended to show that man was living 
in Europe in company with numerous wild animals, now either 
totally extinct or only found in far distant regions, such as the 
mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the hyaena, and the lion. The 
first evidence of this sort was obtained in Kent’s Hole, in 
which flint implements were found in intimate association with 
the bones of these and other animals. The exploration of this 
cavern has been energetically pursued during a long series of 
years with most valuable results. In the same part of England 
similar evidence was obtained from some caves at Brixham ; and 
later on numerous caves in this country, notably Wokey Hole 
in the Mendip Hills, and an extensive series of caves in Belgium 
and in France, have yielded to careful research such an amount 
of evidence, that the fact is now firmly established that man 
was a contemporary with a wild fauna now partially extinct, 
which existed in these countries under climatal conditions very 
different from those now prevailing. 
It is somewhat startling at first, when we come to realize that 
in this country, now so free from wild animals, there was a 
time, and that time the human period, when a most formidable 
array of the larger carnivora roamed at will through vast forests 
which then spread over a great part of these isles, and yet no fact 
rests upon more certain evidence : from the floors of numerous 
caverns large quantities of the bones and teeth of these animals, 
representing individuals of all ages, have been extracted, many 
of them in the most perfect state of preservation. 
Some of the latest and not least important additions to our 
knowledge of the Pleistocene age, and of man’s coexistence 
with its wild fauna in England, have been made by the recent 
discoveries in the Creswell caves in north-east Derbyshire ; and a 
short account of their exploration, and of the results obtained, 
