11 
level and contour. England was broken off from France, the 
British islands formed, and the rivers reduced to their present 
size and courses. 
Sir C. Lyell says : — “ The naturalist would have been entitled 
to assume the former union, within the postpliocene period, of 
all the British isles with each other, and with the Continent, 
even if there had been no geological facts in favour of such a 
position.”* 
The recent examination of the bed of the English Channel, 
for the purposes of a submarine tunnel, confirms the cou elu- 
sion that its disruption is only of recent geological date, that it 
is a denuded hollow in the line of ancient rivers, broken into 
by oscillation, and pared down by the inroad of the sea in post- 
glacial times.f 
(4.) I will briefly refer to the cave evidence. England and 
Wales, like most European countries, contain caves that have 
been occupied by man from the earliest times to the present. 
They inclose not only relics of all ages since they were the 
dwellings or resorts of the people first encountered by the 
Homans, but of a still earlier race whose implements are found 
sealed up in stalagmite, with bones of extinct mammals of the 
same epoch as the valley and terrace gravels. All such caves 
are within one hundred and fifty feet of running water, or of 
the sea, the majority of them within seventy or eighty feet. 
The lowest fossil contents ascertained, correspond with the 
lowest fossiliferous gravels. I will just refer to a few of these. 
Kent’s Cavern, at Torquay, offers us in its lowest bed a typical 
instance of the occurrence of man’s works contemporaneously 
with the mammoth. This locality is familiarized to us all by 
the popular demonstrations of Mr. Pengelly. The stratum in 
question was accumulated or drifted when the entrance to the 
cave was from seventy to one hundred feet lower than at 
present relatively to the sea-level. After an elevation had 
first taken place, a second depression occurred, bringing the 
cave floor level with the sea beach ; since that, gradual changes 
only have followed, from causes now in operation, resulting in 
the present contour of the country. Uuquestionably this 
indicates vast lapses of time ; but the two principal factors — 
the raising and submersion — require the intervention of causes 
* Age of Man, p. 277. 
f I much regret that, at the time of writing, I had not before me 
Professor Geikie’s able work on the “ Great Ice Age.” In discussing it I 
should have claimed him as a witness for catastrophe at this epoch, on the 
ground of that which he terms — “ those mysterious forces by which the solid 
crust of the globe is elevated and depressed ” (p. 509). 
