pressure, after having first undergone violence from the force which impelled and congregated them in this narrow neck. They were found driven into the interstices of the opposite wall, or piled in the greatest confusion against its side, with but a scanty covering of soil, and that of the finest and softest sand intermixed with greasy earth. To enumerate the amount of fossils collected from this spot would be to give the inventory of half my collection, comprising all the genera and their species, including the cultridens; there were hoards, but I must specify jaws and tusks of the elephant with the teeth in the sockets, and the bone of which was so bruised that it fell to powder in our endeavour to extract it, a rare instance of the teeth occurring in their jaws or gums. The same may be observed of the rhinoceros, one portion alone of which was saved, but the teeth of both were numerous and entire. The teeth of the elk, horse, and hyena were taken out whole. The teeth of the two last were gathered in thousands, and in the midst of all were myriads of rodentia. The earth, as may be expected, was saturated with animal matter. It was fat with the sinews and marrow of more wild beasts than would have peopled all the menageries of the world.

"The long bones abounded no less than the jaws, generally bruised and split longitudinally; but, without an exception, they had been broken and gnawed, that is, they had passed through the jaws of carnivorous animals before they were subjected to the violence that crushed them.

"Intermixed with them at lower depths was sand and gravel, and marl, angular and rounded fragments, the former generally limestone, flat masses of which had fallen into the heap from the roof, where its under surface was coated with stalactite, cones and slabs of the latter scattered through schists and slates, and grauwacke, angular and sharp. The rounded substances consisted of small pebbles of limestone, chert, and quartz, green and sand stones."

Whatever evidence may here exist of the long habitation of hyenas in this cave (and I do not deny its force), there is much more cogent evidence of a diluvial current of water having entered the cave, not through the eastern openings (for this is impossible), but having found its way from the land side, and apparently terminated their existence.

This was the opinion of Mr. McEnery, the first human being probably that ever entered this particular part, who says in connection with the heading Diluvium

"The floor was surprised by a body of mud which swept up and confounded promiscuously the materials lying upon it, and that this body of mud so covering the bottom of the

VOL. XIII.

cavern was derived from without, and impelled inwards in a fluid state, and that it was composed of the adventitious transportable materials which it collected in its march, viz., sand, clay, and gravel. That there is evidence of only one such irruption, and that there is no evidence of its having been preceded or followed by another.

"From an inspection of the compound character of the deposit reposing on the substratum of rubble, and enveloping the bones, it is certain that it is merely the sediment of a fluid that held in suspension clay and gravel, which it swept up in passing over the surface of the adjacent country, and threw its waves into the cavern in a tumultuous manner, is manifest from the ruins of the ancient roof and floor buried in the sediment in the shape of loose cones and slabs of spar, and in the accumulation against the opposite walls of heaps of gravel and bones."

"The land flood descended from the mountains to the level of the ocean; and if its direction may be inferred from its gravel, it came from Dartmoor. It can be conceived how the cavern and open fissures may have been filled with a muddy sediment derived from the surrounding surface, by supposing its vehicle to descend from above in the form of rain, and to have washed into the open cavities the movable substances which it met on its march. All this might have happened before the land flood had joined its waters to the ocean. absence of marine exuviæ supports this view.”

The

PART II.

THOSE who desire really to understand the true character of Kent's Cavern should take the trouble to read through some hundred pages of McEnery's MS., left by him in an imperfect state, but published by Mr. Pengelly, under the title of the "Literature of Kent's Cavern." The great beauty of the stalactite in some of the distant recesses of the vast series of caverns which he was the first to enter, the peril and difficulty of the exploration, the weird character of the unknown world revealed to view, and its first impression on the imagination, remind us of some of the descriptions of Dante. The almost incredible abundance of the relics of animal life leads to inquiries as to the surroundings of the cavern; since in the present configuration of the land, it does not appear possible that so large an amount of animal life could have found subsistence in the

neighbourhood. It seems clearly proven, that some of the deepest recesses were quietly tenanted by large bears of three or four distinct species, one of which was the sabre-toothed variety before alluded to a bear with the teeth of a tiger. These held undisputed sway in what may be called the aristocratic portion of the cavern, whilst at the same time, as it would seem, the rest was held possession of by troops of hyenas, of a size about one-third larger than any now in existence, and furnished with teeth of even more than proportionate power. These were the commonalty of the cavern; no doubt, according to the habits of the tribe, ranging through all the surrounding country by night; their brightly-gleaming eyes discerning all objects in the faintest light, and hunting out all carrion, in which they especially delight, by their keen smell, dragging in piecemeal the remains of the huge beasts whose remains were met with. In addition to the mammoth, to which I shall devote further attention, the rhinoceros is one of the most remarkable of these. There are very abundant remains of a small thick-headed, large-teethed horse, which must have much resembled those figured in my paper on the "Early Dawn of Civilization." Beside the dwellers in the cave which I have mentioned, an innumerable multitude of smaller rodentia must have found their subsistence on the remains of the feasts of the gaunt hyenas.

These, together with the bears and the hyenas, apparently perished together in that irruption of a flood which McEnery calls the Diluvium, which left its traces everywhere, and with surprising violence drove the bones and the carcases together into vast cemeteries, still so fœtid with their remains, that the author of the above description nearly lost his life, and certainly impaired his health, in the research. It is probable that few persons will read the unfinished descriptions he has left; but multitudes have given the fullest credence to the abundant literature of the Cave, a large portion of which I myself perused before I was even aware of the existence of McEnery's MS., which antedates much since written.

I should recommend all who explore these caverns not to trust to the light provided by their guides, but to carry with them the bright guidance of their own common sense; or, if this be considered too fatiguing, to receive at my hands the torch of a salutary scepticism, which will disclose the unreality of the spectres that meet their view.

Doubt and uncertainty are perhaps all our acquisitions from these later researches; but these stimulate inquiry. For myself, I must say that I was thus led to study the surroundings of the cavern more carefully.

Notably, I was impressed by the fact, which may be new also to many who, like myself, are not adepts in geology, that these shores were at some time surrounded by low-lying forests, filled with the very same creatures, both predacious and otherwise, to whose remains our attention has been directed. This is shown to have been the case by relics that have been occasionally met with, as well as by appearances of the forests when unusual storms have laid bare the bottom of the sea. Mr. Parker, a member of the Torquay Natural History Society, obtained from some fishermen the tooth of an elephant, dredged up in the trawl on the southern side of Torbay. According to Dr. Falconer, it is "exceedingly fresh-looking, and free from any incrustation of marine polyzoa, with which it must have. got covered if it had lain long at the bottom of the sea.

Dr. Falconer says, "This Torbay peat-bed in which the above tooth, it is supposed, rested, indicates a subsidence of the land in Devonshire, then peopled with elephants of a very modern date, and long subsequent to the period of the raised beach which is so boldly developed along that part of the coast." And according to Sir C. Lyell, "the specimen is interesting as serving to establish the fact, that the mammoth survived when the surface of the region had already acquired its present configuration, so far as relates to the direction and depth of the valleys, in the bottom of one of which the peat alluded to was found."

Again, in 1869, 1871, and 1872, Mr. Hutchinson laid before the Devonshire Association molars of mammoth cast up by the waves on Sidmouth beach. In 1872 he also produced an unusually large molar of the same species, found in the Sid by a young man wading up the river in search of lampreys; and in 1873 he read to the same body a paper on "Submerged Forests and Mammoth teeth at Sidmouth," when he described a series of carefully observed facts connected with a submerged forest laid bare on Sidmouth beach by the gales of the preceding winter. In this were found four mammoth molars.

The Mammoth, Elephas primigenius (Blumenbach), was, as we have seen, contemporary with man. I have in a previous paper shown a very well-designed representation of this creature, sketched on ivory from a living specimen.

I shall now seek to show that the era of its co-existence with man is after all not so remote. The very name may lead us towards this conclusion, as men do not generally occupy themselves with finding out names for things with which they are unacquainted. (Compare Dr. Latham's Dic. in loco.)

I should derive the word originally from the Hebrew,