92 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN 
of the neck is of moderate dimensions, and the width of 
the neck behind the ears, the bimastoid width, is 120 
mm. The width of the face (bizygomatic diameter) was 
about 130 mm. It is a small-headed man we have to 
picture in the Langwith cave, but one not showing any 
markedly low or primitive character. 
To continue our survey of the remains of late 
Palaeolithic man in England, we now move from the 
centre to the south-west of England — to that part 
of the county of Somerset which bounds the eastern 
shore of the Bristol Channel. Here a range of limestone 
hills — the Mendips — run from east to west. Along 
their southern base flows the Axe, making a westward 
course through a marshy, flat strip of country. Near 
the cathedral town of Wells, only sixteen miles distant 
from the Bristol Channel, the Axe issues from a cave in a 
southern cliffy of the Mendips. Close by is the famous 
hyena cave — Wookey Hole — first explored by Professor 
Boyd Dawkins in 1859, the year before Lartet examined 
the cave at Aurignac. In that year, and in the following, 
he discovered in the buried floor of the cave the hearths, 
the flints, the bone implements, and the extinct animals 
which Lartet found in the cave at Aurignac — only more 
abundantly ; he found no human remains. Professor 
Boyd Dawkins arrived at the same conclusion as Lartet 
did, namely, that man must have existed as a con- 
temporary of the extinct Pleistocene animals. The 
veteran pioneer of " Cave Hunting " ^ has lived to see a 
revolution in our attitude towards the question of man's 
antiquity. A passage he wrote in i860 will show that 
the truth he contended for then is now admitted by all. 
" It is certain that man was contemporary in the district 
with the hyena and the animals on which it preyed, and 
the fact that the ancient implements were found only on 
one spot implies that they were deposited by the hand of 
man. To suppose that a savage would take the trouble 
to excavate a trench 24 feet long with miserable 
implements and consequently with great labour, and, 
1 Ca%)e Huntings Macmillan & Co., 1874. 
