Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 33.djvu/681

Rh iron socket in its under side; this may have been the boss of a sword or dagger. In other parts of the cavern nothing of any importance was discovered in the surface-soil; here and there we met with broken fragments of Roman and later pottery; and we have heard that a coin of Faustina has since been picked up outside; but we were disappointed in finding so few traces of Roman or Romano-British occupation.

3. The Breccia.—A great quantity of breccia (2) remained on the left-hand side of Chamber A, blocking up the entrance to Robin Hood's Parlour (C); this had to be removed by frequent blasting, before the cave-earth below could be reached. The breccia, which near the entrance of the cave had proved very rich in its fossil contents, yielding numerous bones and flint implements, contained very little further in, owing probably to its having accumulated in close proximity to the roof, to which at several points it was united by thick masses of stalactite and stalagmite. Above the breccia in this part of the cave the stalagmite was as much as 2 feet thick (fig. 2).

Amongst the stalagmitic breccia, some very beautiful crystallizations of calcite occurred, with most delicate acicular and botryoidal forms. Towards the back of Chamber C the breccia thinned out, as well as towards the right-hand side of the cave, where it was absent, except at the mouth of the small side fissure (Chamber G). The few remains found in the breccia consisted, as before, of bones of the Hare, a few teeth of the larger Pleistocene Mammalia (R. tichorhinus, Hyæna, Bear, and Horse), together with fragmentary flint implements and a small piece of ruddle.

4. The Cave-Earth.—The succeeding deposit, that of cave-earth (3), was very uniformly distributed throughout the cavern, although varying very considerably in thickness in different parts. Near to the entrance, as has been observed in a previous paper, it was very thin where the breccia attained its greatest development; but in the inner parts of the cave it increased considerably in amount, being as much as 4 feet 6 inches thick at the extremity of Chamber F (fig. 5).

Under the breccia between the square doorway and the mouth of the cave, the bed of waterworn pebbles mentioned in the second paper on these caves became a thickish red conglomerate, the pebbles being firmly cemented together by iron and lime. The deposit was of very limited extent, but apparently denoted the presence of a stream of water running across this part of the cavern during a short period. As there was no trace of a continuance of the pebble-bed towards the entrance of the cave, it was perhaps thrown down in a hollow of the floor during some flooding.

From the cave-earth the most important remains, both of the Pleistocene Mammalia and of Man, have been obtained; in it bones and teeth in great abundance of all the species that have already been catalogued as occurring in this cavern continued to be found in all the chambers. Horse's teeth were particularly numerous. In Chamber G several large bones (Mammoth) were found lying