Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/404

378 bogs of Denmark, with their successive layers of beech, pedunculated oak, sessile oak, and Scotch fir, we learn from the facts that even the lowest zone of the bogs has yielded no bones of mammals but those of recent species, and no tools but those of Neolithic type; whilst even the granular stalagmite, the uppermost of the Hyænine beds in Kent's Hole, has afforded relics of mammoth, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, Cave Bear, and Cave Hyæna.

That the men of the Cave Breccia, or Ursine period, to whom we now turn, were of still higher antiquity, is obvious from the geological position of their industrial remains. That the two races of Troglodytes were separated by a wide interval of time we learn from the sheet of crystalline stalagmite, sometimes 12 feet thick, laid down after the deposition of the breccia had ceased, and before the introduction of the cave-earth had begun, as well as from the entire change in the materials composing the two deposits. But, perhaps, the fact which most emphatically indicates the chronological value of this interval is the difference in the faunas. In the cave-earth, as already slated, the remains of the Hyæna greatly exceed in number those of any other mammal; and it may be added that he is also disclosed by almost every relic of his contemporaries—their jaws have, through his agency, lost their condyles and lower borders; their bones are fractured after a fashion known by experiment to be his; and the splinters into which they are broken are deeply scored with his teeth-marks. His presence is also attested by the abundance of his droppings in every branch of the cavern. In short, Kent's Hole was one of his homes; he dragged hither, piecemeal, such animals as he found dead near it; and the well-known habits of his representatives of our day have led us to expect all this from him. When, however, we turn to the breccia, a very different spectacle awaits us. We meet with no trace whatever of his presence, not a single relic of his skeleton, not a bone on which he has operated, not a coprolite to mark as much as a visit. Can it be doubted that had he then occupied our country he would have taken up his abode in our cavern? Need we hesitate to regard this entire absence of all traces of so decided a cave-dweller as a proof that he had not yet made his advent in Britain? Are we not compelled to believe that Man formed part of the Devonshire fauna long before the Hyæna did? Is there any method of escaping the conclusion that between the era of the Breccia and that of the Cave-earth it