CAYES AND THEIR OCCUPANTS. 
375 
will show something of the nature of cave researches, and will 
at the same time also assist us in picturing to ourselves some of 
the conditions of life during what we may look upon as the 
dawn of the human period in Great Britain.* 
The caves of Creswell are beautifully situated in a small craggy 
ravine in the Magnesian Limestone on the border of the counties 
of Derby and Nottingham (fig. 1.). They are of no great size, 
being little more than enlarged fissures. Three of these have 
been carefully examined since their discovery as bone caves by 
Fig. 1. 
VIEW OF CRESWELL CRAG, LOOKING EAST.t 
the writer in 1875, and they are known as the Pin Hole, the 
Eobin Hood Cave, and the Church Hole. The last two are 
the largest and also the most important, especially on account of 
the abundant traces of man’s handiwork in conjunction with 
very numerous bones of the extinct mammalia, which are dis- 
tributed throughout the soil forming their floors. 
The Pin Hole cave is a long and narrow fissure, containing 
under a thin crust of recent surface soil a bed of red sand about 
three feet thick. This was found to be full of bones, many of 
them broken and gnawed, belonging to about eleven genera of 
mammals of the Pleistocene period, but without any distinct 
traces of man’s presence, although there are, as we shall see, so 
* See Papers by Professors Busk, W. Boyd Dawkins, and the writer, in 
the “ Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc.” for November 1875, August 1876, and 
August 1877. 
t This and the other figures illustrating ihis paper, have been kindly 
lent to U3 by the President and Council of the Geological Society. 
