Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/403

Rh animals ever did more than make occasional visits to Brixham Cave. The latter contained no flint-chips, no bone-tools, no utilized Pecten-shells, no bits of charcoal, and no coprolites of Hyæna, all of which occurred in the cave-earth of Kent's Hole.

2nd. In the Torquay Cave relics of Hyæna were much more abundant in the cave-earth than those of any other species. Taking the teeth alone, of which vast numbers were found, those of the Hyæna amounted to about -30 per cent, of the entire series, notwithstanding the fact that, compared with most of the caveinammals, his jaws, when furnished completely, possess but few teeth. At Brixham, on the other hand, his relics of all kinds amounted to no more than 8·5 per cent, of all the osseous remains, whilst those of the Bear rose to 53 per cent.

3rd. The entrances of Brixham Cavern were completely filled up and its history suspended not later than the end of the Palaeolithic era. Nothing occurred within it from the days when Devonshire was occupied by the Cave and Grizzly Bears, Reindeer, Rhinoceros, Cave Lion, Mammoth, and Man, whose best tools were unpolished flints, until the quarrymen broke into it early in A.D. 1858. Kent's Cavern, on the contrary, seems to have never been closed, never unvisited by man, from the earliest Palæolithic times to our own, with the possible exception of the Neolithic era, of which it cannot be said to have yielded any certain evidence.

Though my "History of Cavern Exploration in Devonshire" is now completed, so far as the time at my disposal will allow, and so far as the materials are at present ripe for the historian, I venture to ask your further indulgence for a few brief moments whilst passing from the region of fact to that of inference.

That the Kent's Hole men of the Hyænine period—to say nothing at present of their predecessors of the Breccia—belonged to the Pleistocene times of the biologist, is seen in the fact that they were contemporary with mammals peculiar to and characteristic of those times. This contemporaneity proves them to have belonged to the Palæolithic era of Britain and Western Europe generally, as defined by the archæologist; and this is fully confirmed by their unpolished tools of flint and chert. That they were prior to the deposition of even the oldest part of the peat Rh