342 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
It is obvious from his account of his first visit to the Cavern, 
made with a party léd by the late Mr. Northmore of Cleve, near 
Exeter, in the summer of 1825, that he had at that time neither 
any knowledge of geology nor any specific purpose in the visit. 
‘‘The passage,” he says, ‘‘ being too narrow to admit more than 
one person at a time. . . the company entered in files, each having 
a light in one hand and a pickaxe in the other, headed by a guide, 
carrying a lantern before the chief of the band. I made the last 
of the train, for I could not divest myself of certain undefinable 
sensations, it being my first visit to a scene of this nature.” * 
Being doubtful whether Mr. Northmore employed the best method 
to discover such fossils as the Cavern might contain, he separated 
from the company, and worked quietly by himself in a small 
recess, where he had the good fortune to disinter teeth and other 
osseous remains. ‘‘ They were,’ he says, ‘‘the first fossil teeth 
I had ever seen, and as I laid my hand on them, relics of ex- 
tinct races, and witnesses of an order of things which passed away 
with them, I shrank back involuntarily. Though not insensible 
to the excitement attending new discoveries, I am not ashamed to 
own that in the presence of these remains I felt more of awe than 
Joy.” t 
Soon after this, he appears to have visited the Cavern again, for 
in another part of his manuscript he says, ‘“‘In the summer of 
1825 Dr. Buckland, accompanied by Mr. Northmore of Cleve, 
visited the Cave of Kent’s Hole in search of bones. I attended 
them. Nothing remarkable was discovered that day excepting the 
tooth of a Rhinoceros and a flint blade. This was the first instance 
of the occurrence of British relics being noticed in this or I believe 
any other cave. Both these relics ’twas my good fortune to find.” } 
At the close of 1825 he commenced what he intended to be ‘‘a 
thorough examination both of the main branches of the Cavern and 
of its most intricate involutions and secret recesses,’’ and continued 
it with but little interruption for some considerable time. There 
is nothing to show when his researches terminated, but the last of 
his visits to the Cavern to which he affixed a date—a thing by no 
means usual with him—was that made on the 14th August, 1829. § 
It may therefore be safely concluded that he devoted the greater 
portion of, at least, almost four years to the work, and it is by no 
* «Trans. Devon. Assoc.,”’ vol. iii. (1869), p. 208. 
t+ Ibid, p. 210. { Ibid, p. 441. § Ibid, p. 295. 
