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Manchester to refuse your invitation to the discussion on Mr. Callard’s 
paper 1 
“ The author of the paper has directed the attention of the Society more 
particularly to two explorations of caves with which my name is connected, 
polar axis of the earth relatively to the sun which would alone produce the 
effects in question that have to he accounted for. The sun, our great 
governor, it is fair to conclude, regulates all the important movements of the 
earth, and, among others, its diurnal rotation on its axis. Mr. Crooke’s 
discovery of the motive power of light presents us with just the agency to 
effect such a movement. The sun itself rotates on its axis, and is believed, 
with all other heavenly orbs, to be in progress round some very distant and 
common centre. The sun is thus not a fixed body, but is subject to those 
external influences and consequent divergences which we see prevail among 
the planetary bodies, including the earth, from the associations with one 
another in which they are involved. Thus, it is easy to suppose that there 
may be such a constant alteration in the line of the sun’s action upon the 
earth as would effect the continuous change in our polar axis now in view. 
That astronomers, in the course of their observations, maintained persistently 
and with suitable instruments only in comparatively modern times, have 
failed hitherto to detect such a movement, is no proof of its non-occurrence. 
The movement would be a very gradual one, to be ascertained only at long 
intervals of observation, and difficult of detection among other complicated 
operations influencing the sun’s position relatively to the earth, such as the 
precessional rotation of the poles with its nutatory divergences, the altera- 
tion in the angle of the ecliptic, and that in the ellipticity of the orbit. 
“ To pass now to the testimony of the cavernous deposits, it appears to be 
a law that the stalagmite floorings repeat themselves, and are not restricted 
in the instance of each cave to one such coating. There are two such floor- 
ings in the Windmill Cave at Brixham, in Poole’s Cavern at Buxton, in the 
caves of the Wye, and in the Trou de la Naulette, near Dinant, in Belgium. 
Kent’s Cave, near Torquay, has had three such floorings, its capacity in depth 
and its antiquity having apparently permitted of the additional coating, and 
should the limits of depth and antiquity allow thereof, more, it may be pre- 
sumed, would appear here or elsewhere. Now, what, it may be asked, can 
be more reasonable to suppose than that the stoppage and renewal of the drip, 
necessary to allow of the occurrence of these distinctly divided floorings, has 
been occasioned by these caverns passing into a glacial temperature which 
has frozen up the drip, and afterwards into a warmer one, which has thawed 
and renewed it ? 
“ In Kent’s Cave, on the upper floor of stalagmite, are inscriptions reaching 
back beyond 250 years, the deposition on which is estimated to have been 
at the rate of but one inch in 5,000 years. The floor here measures several 
feet in thickness, so that the formation of a floor occupies a very lengthened 
term of years, as the necessities of the case suggested by me require. This 
floor, as I must presume from its advanced stage towards attaining the pro- 
portions of the one below it, was commenced long ago, or when the cavern 
was set free of the domination of ice in the vicinity of the South Pole, and 
will be maintained until it reaches a corresponding propinquity to the North 
Pole. The floor, it will thus appear, must have passed, in the process of its 
deposition, through the equatorial or tropical region. A portion of a human 
jaw with some teeth has been met with in this floor, where it had attained a 
thickness of 20 inches ; and below the floor, at a spot called the black band, 
have been found abundance of charred wood and some artificially formed 
bone implements, giving indubitable evidence of the existence of man at the 
