FLINT IMPLEMENTS FOUND IN KENT'S CAVERN. 373 
Archeological Ages of Western Europe, the Peat bogs of Denmark, 
and the Geographical changes which Britain has undergone, we, at 
the outset, encounter the fact that the Cavern series is incomplete. 
There is one term missing. It has yielded no Neolithic imple- 
ments. The uppermost deposit, the Black Mould, certainly extends 
back to pre-Roman times; it must represent two thousand years as 
a minimum, and may represent a very much longer period; but 
there is no reason to suppose that it goes back to Neolithic times. 
In passing from it to the Granular Stalagmite on which it imme- 
diately lies, we step at once from the era of metals, and of animals 
all still living in Western Europe, and almost all of them in 
Devonshire, back to the Palexolithic Age and the times of the ex- 
tinct Mammoth and his contemporaries. There is here, no doubt, 
an unrepresented interval, the value of which cannot be estimated. 
But waiving this, it is obvious from what has been said, that 
neither the Peat bogs of Denmark, with their successive zones of 
Beech, Pedunculated Oak, Sessile oak, and Scotch fir, nor the 
successive Ages of Iron, Bronze, and Polished Flints, can take us 
back further than to, if so far as, the top of the Granular Stalag- 
mite. To enter this deposit, no matter how shallow the depth, is 
to disclose an extinct fauna, and to enter periods having an 
antiquity greatly exceeding theirs. 
These older periods are represented by a sheet of Granular 
Stalagmite in some cases fully five feet thick, to which accretions 
are still being steadily made, but at the rate of not more than one- 
twentieth of an inch in 250 years. Earlier still, was the period of 
the Cave Earth, representing a prodigious amount of time it 
cannot be doubted, during which vast numbers of herbivorous and 
carnivorous animals lived in this country; when the Hyzena made 
the Cavern its home, and dragged into it portions of such animals 
as it found dead in its neighbourhood; when the whole of Western 
Europe stood at a level considerably higher than at present, and 
Britain was a part of the continent. Earlier than this, was that 
period during which the Cavern deposits older than the Cave Earth 
were broken up and dislodged by some natural agency, of which 
the exact character appears to be undiscoverable. In times still 
more ancient, an older Stalagmite, of vastly greater thickness and 
of a totally different texture, was laid down throughout the 
Cavern, and, unless it was the product of conditions so utterly un- 
like such as now obtain that to imagine their existence is but to 
2 8B 
