374 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
take another road into antiquity, this must have absorbed an 
amount of time which from its vastness the mind fails to appre- 
hend. And further back still and earliest of all, we find the 
Cavern receiving a deposit, utterly unlike the Cave-earth and 
certainly derived from a totally different source, in which were 
inhumed an enormous number of bones and teeth, but without a 
trace or indication of the Hyzna amongst them; when Britain 
was either an island, or more correctly an archipelago of small 
islets, with icebergs floating in its seas and grounding on its shores; 
or, what is far more probable, when, on the ancient side of that 
era of great submergence, it for the first time during the Pleisto- 
cene era was in a continental state; when the climate was more 
genial than it is at present; when the Glacial Ages had not com- 
menced; and even the Hlephas meridionalis still existed. 
Even at that early time Devonshire was occupied by men, whose 
rude flint tools have recently been found in Kent’s Hole. They 
are probably the earliest human beings of which Science has yet 
caught a glimpse; but, warned by experience, it is felt to be 
unsafe to call them Primeval Men or the <Autocthenes of Devon- 
shire, since further discoveries may await us. They are satisfactory 
evidence of the vast antiquity of Man in Britain, but unless our 
comparatively ungenial Island was, or was near, the cradle of the 
human race, this must fall very far short of the antiquity ef Man 
in the world. 
Up to the present time, as Kent’s Cavern has disclosed more 
and more ancient men, it has shown that they were ruder and 
ruder as they extended into antiquity. The men of the Black 
Mould had a great variety of implements, they used spindle 
whorls, and made pottery, and smelted and compounded metals, 
and wore amber beads. The older men of the Cave-earth made a 
few bone tools, and used needles, and could produce fire, and they 
even perforated the teeth of mammals to enable them to be strung 
as necklaces or bracelets; but they had neither spindle whorls, nor 
pottery, nor metals of any kind; their most powerful weapons 
were made of flakes of flint and chert, many of them symmetrically 
formed and carefully chipped, but it seems never to have occurred to 
them to increase their efficiency by polishing them. The still more 
ancient men of the Breccia have left behind them not even a 
single bone tool, and no indication that they were acquainted with 
