Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/402

376 In April last (1877) the Rev. J.M. Mello was able to inform the Geological Society of London that Derbyshire had shared with Devon the honour of having been a home of Machairodus latidens, he having found its canine tooth in Robin Hood Cave, in that county, and that there, as in Kent's Hole, it was commingled with remains of the Cave Hyæna and its contemporaries (Abs. Proc. Geol. Soc., No. 334, pp. 3, 4).

The Ash-Hole, as we have already seen, afforded the first good evidence of a British Reindeer.

In looking at the published reports on the two famous Torbay caverns it will be found that they have certain points of resemblance as well as some of dissimilarity:—

1st. The lowest known bed in each is composed of materials which, whilst they differ in the two cases, agree in being such as may have been furnished by the districts adjacent to the cavern-hills respectively, but not by the hills themselves, and must have been deposited prior to the existing local geographical conditions. In each this bed contained flint implements and relics of Bear, but in neither of them those of Hyæna. In short, the fourth bed of Windmill Hill Cavern, Brixham, and the breccia of Kent's Hole, Torquay, are coeval, and belong to what I have called the Ursine period of the latter.

2nd. The beds just mentioned were in each cavern sealed with a sheet of stalagmite, which was partially broken up, and considerable portions of the subjacent beds were dislodged before the introduction of the beds next deposited.

3rd. The great bone bed, both at Brixham and Torquay, consisted of red clayey loam, with a large percentage of angular fragments of limestone; and contained flake implements of flint and chert, inosculating with remains of Mammoth, the Tichorhine Rhinoceros, and Hyæna. In fine, the cave-earth of Kent's Hole and the third bed of Brixham Cavern correspond in their materials, in their osseous contents, and in their flint tools. They both belong to what I have named the Hyænine period of the Torquay Cave.

But, as already stated, there are points in which the two caverns differ:—

1st. Whilst Kent's Hole was the home of man, as well as of the contemporary Hyæna during the absences of the human occupant, there is no reason to suppose that either man or any of the lower