sauvages ne se jettent dans les fleuves et que les inondations ne les entraînent que très rarement."

But if this fluviatile theory is doomed to perish by force of facts, so must perish also the calculations of our scientists, who invent rivers where there are none; and in order to make them flow at a level with the mouths of the caverns, as in Kent's Hole, raise the bottom of the valley 70 feet,* or 300 feet, or any other number up to 7,000 or 8,000 feet; as we have seen in the previous pages would be needful in South America; and then set themselves to calculate the time the rivers have been employed in excavating the valleys -a task which there is no appearance that they ever have been competent to perform; seeing that ordinarily tranquil-flowing rivers notoriously raise the bottom of the valleys (in my neighbourhood to the extent of many feet since. the time of the Romans), and it must be remembered that all these streams, starting at first with so little fall, must have been tranquil-flowing streams.

Mr. Boyd-Dawkins remarks that "the general surface of the valleys has undergone but little change since history began, and the excavation by the rivers has been so small as to have escaped accurate measurement" (p. 271).

"J'ai fait remarquer que le terrain pampéen se trouve dans les Pampas, et jusqu'au sommet des Cordillères dans les vastes dépressions du plateau bolivien et du plateau de Cochabamba, jusqu'à la hauteur de 4,000 mètres au-dessus du niveau de la mer. Si, comme l'a crv M. Darwin, le dépôt des Pampas n'était que le produit des affluens fluviatiles dans un estuaire, comment s'explique la présence de ce même dépôt dans les plaines et sur les plateaux les plus élevés du monde? Je crois qu'il faut entièrement renoncer à cette explication, puisque des dépôts identiques avec leurs ossemens se trouvent à toutes les hauteurs. Ils ne seraient point dù à des causes partielles, mais bien à des causes générales purement terrestres, et l'on ne peut s'en rendre compte d'une manière satisfaisante, qu'en admettant comme résultats de tous les faits géologiques observés sur le sol Américain, la coincidence d'effets d'un des reliefs de la Cordillère, avec la destruction complète des grandes races d'animaux qui le peuplaient avant l'époque actuelle et la formation du dépôt pampéen à ossemens, qui parait recouvrir presque toute l'Amérique méridionale."-D'Orbigny, vol. iii. pp. 254, 255.

The Pampas Deposit.

"Cette couche, qui remplit le fond du bassin des Pampas, et compose exclusivement toutes les Pampas proprement dites, occupe une très-large surface arrondie vers le sud; surface qui n'aurait pas, à elle seule, moins de 38 degrés carrés ou 23·750 lieues carrées de superficie— on dirait, en examinant l'argile pampéenne, qu'elle s'est, en quelque sorte, déposée dans un laps de tems très-court comme le résultat d'une grande commotion terrestre.”— D'Orbigny, vol. iii. p. 73, also p. 52.

Dilurium,

As only one side of the question has hitherto been presented to the public by the advocates of the fluviatile theory, I subjoin McEnery's remarks, under the head Diluvium (page 68, Lit. Kent's Care) :

From an inspection of the compound character of the deposit reposing on the substratum of rubble and enveloping the bones, it is certain

*The Cave Men of Devonshire," lecture by Mr. Pengelly, Manchester, 1875.-" If there is anything that is clearly established in the minds of those who have studied the phenomena of Kent's Cavern, it is that the cave-earth was washed in through the present entrances of the cavern, which it will be remembered are some 70 feet above the bottom of the valley," &c. + Boyd-Dawkins, p. 275.

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 its 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.

"In the upper gallery they are so thinly dispersed that their existence is only traced by a straggling bone.

"At the foot of the slope splinters of bone and of stones were driven into the crevices of the rock, and the remains of rodentia, accompanied by fine gravel, injected into the chambers of the skulls and long bones, places into which it was impossible for them to have penetrated without the agency of a fluid in violent commotion.

"Fragments of jaws and bones perfectly corresponding, that had been divided, not by the teeth of animals, but by mechanical force, were picked up in the upper and lower gallery at the distance of 70 feet from each other.

"But that it was as transient as it was violent appears from the unrolled condition of the bones, and still further from the state of the album vetus. The great majority of it was detained in the narrow strait, where it was deposited between upright walls in heaps, while scattered balls entangled in the mud and perhaps carried down by eddies arising from cavities in the floor, were scattered through all depths; more of it, from its buoyancy, was floated upwards to the surface. The whole must have been reduced to powder, the teeth dislodged from their sockets, and the processes of the bones struck off in the supposition of a long-continued agitation of the mass. It further appears that it subsided by degrees, in proportion as the liquid in which the clay and gravel were suspended escaped through the bottom of the cavern. The large masses of rock and heavier bones sank undermost, just as they are found. Marks of its gradual subsidence before the stalagmite had yet acquired consistence may be traced on the sides of the cavern like tide-marks."

“One such man used to live at Bradford, in the Isle of Skye, who told wondrous tales of the Elan na Fermor (Island of the Big Men), that is, the opposite Isle of Raasay, where huge bones of some extinct race of giants are still shown in the kirk. He told also of the Picts, or little men, whose curious 'beehive houses' built under ground, chamber within chamber, still puzzle the antiquarians in Lewis and Uist; unless, indeed, they have been content to accept Campbell of Islay's suggestion, of the strange likeness between these old houses and those in common use among the little Lapps of the present day. Both are alike sunk in the ground, so that to the passer-by they appear but a grassy conical hillock, with a hole at the top to act as a chimney for the fire, which burns in the centre of the hut, a chimney through which a man standing upright might suddenly thrust his head, greatly to the amazement of the passers-by. Round these huts, say the old Gaelic fairy tales, the little men drove their herds of wild deer, and the little women came forth to milk the hinds, just as at the present day the little Lapps still drive the wild deer down from the mountains, and the little Lapp women milk the hinds and give the traveller reindeer cream in bowls of

birch-wood. And in case any foolish unbeliever should doubt, as some have doubted, the existence of reindeer on Scottish hills, and should venture to suggest that our wild red deer never would submit tamely to be thus herded and driven about, we refer him to the old Orkney saga, which tells how, in the eleventh century, when Harald and Ronald, Earls of Orkney, made peace after their deadly feuds, they came over to Caithness to hunt the reindeer, and they and their merry men feasted abundantly on their venison, and left a great store of bones, both of red deer and reindeer, as a special legacy to Professor Owen, and for the discomfiture of the incredulous, for there the bones remain to this day."-From the Hebrides to the Himalayas, vol. i. p. 183, by C. F. Gordon-Cumming.

M. Chabas well observes :

66

APPENDIX F.

Longtemps comprimé dans un cercle trop étroit l'esprit humain a franchi toutes les barrières qu'on lui opposait, et semblable au torrent qui a rompu ses digues, il est répandu sans frein dans toutes les directions.

La réflexion et l'étude le rameneront peu à pen dans la voie normale."-Etudes sur l'Antiquité Historique, Int., p. 2.

APPENDIX G.

In order to complete my library of Cave books, I have, since writing this paper, procured the "Antiquités Celtiques" of M. Boucher de Perthes, and the "Reliquiæ Aquitanica" of Messrs. Lartet and Christy. To my surprise I find in the former the works of a man of real genius, who spared neither labour nor expense in the verification of knowledge. He published, in 1838, a work at Paris entitled De la Création, and in which he insisted that traces of antediluvian man would sooner or later be found. He rested "this opinion (1) on the tradition of a race of men destroyed by the Deluge; (2) on the geological proofs of this Deluge; (3) on the existence at this epoch of the mammiferous animals (mammifères), the nearest to man, and unable to exist except under the same atmospherical conditions; (4) on the certainty thus acquired that the earth was habitable for man; (5) that in all regions, islands or continents, where these great mammifères have been found man lived, or had lived and that at the era of the Deluge the race was already sufficiently numerous to leave signs of its passage; (6) these remains of human beings may have escaped the attention of geologists versal belief comes to the assistance of tradition, that evidently a race of men anterior to the last cataclysm, which has changed the surface of the earth, lived at the same time, and apparently in the same places as the great quadrupeds of which the bones have been found.”*

.uni

Proceeding on this supposition, Mr. Perthes never rested till he had found in what was then called the Diluvium, and in that alone (vol. ii. pp. 9, 11, 52), the traces which he sought of human workmanship.

Will our geologists tell us why this fruitful theory has been abandoned for the sake of impossible fluviatile theories and tranquil alluvial deposits ?—

* Ant. Celt., p. 3.

LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED.

"Reliquiæ Diluviana." By Rev. W. Buckland, B.D., F.R.S. 1823. "Cave-Hunting." W. Boyd Dawkins, F.R.S. 1874.

Rude Stone Monuments." J. Fergusson, D.C.L., F.R.S. 1872. Epoch of the Mammoth." J. C. Southall, A.M., LL.D. 1878. "Les Premières Civilisations." Par F. Lenormant.

1874.

"Etudes sur l'Antiquité Historique." Par F. Chabas. 1873.
"The World before the Deluge." By L. Figuier. 1867.
"Primitive Man." By L. Figuier. 1876.

"Palæontological Memoirs and Notes." By Hugh Falconer, A.M., M.D. 1868.

"The Antiquity of Man." By Sir C. Lyell. Fourth edition. 1873. "Voyage dans l'Amérique Méridionale." Par A. D'Orbigny. 1855. "Camden's Britannia."

1695.

Géologie et Volcans éteints du Centre de la France." E. Vincent. 1866. "Lyell's Principles of Geology." Lyell. 1847.

"The Literature of Kent's Cavern." Part II. (McEnery's MS.)

"Kent's Cavern." A Lecture delivered in Glasgow by W. Pengelly, F.R.S. 1876.

Antiquity of the Cave-Men." By do. do. 1877.

"The Ancient Cave-Men of Devonshire." Torquay.

"Notes on Recent Notices of the Geology and Palæontology of Devonshire." By W. Pengelly, F.R.S. Teignmouth, 1874.

"The Antiquity of Man in the South-west of England." By W. Pengelly, F.R.S. 1867.

"The Time which has elapsed since the Era of Kent's Cavern and the Cave-Men of Devonshire." By W. Pengelly, F.R.S. Two Lectures at Manchester. 1872 and 1875.

"First Report of the Committee for Exploring Kent's Cavern, Devonshire," presented to the British Association.

"Second Report." Ditto.

"Third Report." Ditto.

"Fourth Report." Ditto.

"The Time that has elapsed since the Era of the Cave-Men of Devonshire." W. Pengelly, F.R.S. 1873.

The Romance of Kent's Cavern." E. Vivian, Teign Naturalists' Field Club.

"Palæolithic Man: a Reality of the Past, or a Myth of the Present." By N. Whitley, C.E.

"The Lapse of Time since the Glacial Epoch." By J. C. Southall Vic. Ins,

*** The italics in quotations are my insertion.

The CHAIRMAN.-I think we must all thank Mr. Howard for his interesting and important paper. It is the more interesting to us when we consider the purpose which, in his own mind, the writer has evidently set before him. He has very well dealt with the conclusions of certain scientific men, who seem to be desirous of calling in question the whole doctrines of religion. They write with what is manifestly a foregone conclusion, and all their observations are tainted with this fact. They are searching for something which they have already condemned in their own mind without sufficient examination, and it is very important that when men are found going forth and calling in question the truths of religion there should be such men as Mr. Howard to show the wholesale manner in which they contradict each other; for, although these men have really no ground to stand upon, they are at the same time very industrious in going about the country and practising upon the credulity of those to whom they lecture, and if their teachings were not called in question, people would be inclined to say they would have been called in question if they were not true, and that these men are great men and true. Consequently, it is, as I have already said, important that men like Mr. Howard should have the opportunity of dealing with these people, as he has just done in the interesting paper we have listened to.

The HON. SECRETARY said-Before the discussion commences I have to read the following communications.* The first is from Professor Challis, F.R.S.:

"I have read Mr. Howard's paper with much interest, as it confirms by appeal to facts views which I entertain respecting the date and effects of the Deluge from theoretic considerations."

*The following letter was received from Mr. Pengelly, to whom an early proof of the paper had been sent. The paper when read did not contain the term "crypt of dates," and the peculiar nature of the error, the only one alluded to in Mr. Pengelly's letter, prevented the possibility of its affecting the argument. His letter was read, and is inserted in accordance with an assurance which was given to him. Replies from those whose arguments may be disputed are always encouraged.-ED.

LAMORNA, TORQUAY, 1st February, 1879. SIR,-Be So good as to convey my thanks to your Council for so kindly inviting me to be present at the discussion on Mr. J. E. Howard's paper on 3rd inst., and to express my regret that, owing to the very short notice, and a pressure of engagements, it will not be in my power to attend.

"I am sorry that Mr. Howard did not send me his MS., for, though I have not had time to glance at more than a page here and there of the proof you were so good as to forward, I perceive that he has fallen into the error of supposing that he visited the Crypt of Dates in Kent's Cavern (see page 166), he having confounded that recess with the Cave of Inscriptions, which is in a distant part of the Cavern.