IN the western side of the beautiful Vale of Ilsham, about a mile eastward from the harbour of Torquay in Devonshire, and half a mile from the northern shore of Torbay, stands a small, wooded, limestone hill, containing a large cavern, which, under the name of Kent's Hole, has been known from time immemorial, and during nearly half a century has attracted the attention of geologists and archæologists. In 1846 the Torquay Natural History Society appointed a committee to make an exploration of this cavern, mainly for the purpose of obtaining specimens for their newly established Museum. The results were embodied in a short Report which was read to the Geological Society of London in May 1847, and to the British Association at Oxford in the succeeding month. In the abstract of it, printed in the annual volume of the latter body, the following stateinent occurs: 'The important point which we have established is, that relics of human art are found beneath the floor of stalagmite. After taking every precaution, by sweeping the surface, and examining most minutely whether there were any traces of the floor having been previously disturbed, we broke through the solid stalagmite in three different parts of the cavern, and in each instance found flint knives closely resembling those in the most ancient barrows. The thickness of the stalagmite is about two feet.' Stalagmite, it may be explained, is a deposit of limestone formed by the dropping of water from the roof, this water having dissolved the lime in sinking through the rocks above. It had been known for upwards of twenty years that by breaking No. 76. I through the stalagmite in this cavern the remains of animals were to be found in great numbers, and that nearly one-half of them belonged to species which no longer live anywhere in the world. In the passage just quoted, therefore, the committee inferentially expressed the opinion that man had been in Devonshire the contemporary of the extinct cave-mammals, and that the time required for the formation of a sheet of stalagmite two feet thick, added to that which has elapsed since, falls short of his antiquity. In short, it amounted to a declaration on the part of the authors that man was of higher antiquity than had been commonly supposed; and as such it seems to have been understood by the Council of the Geological Society, as they contented themselves with printing in their Journal the following brief mention of the communication: On Kent's Cavern, near Torquay.-In this paper an account was given of some recent researches in that cavern by a committee of the Torquay Natural History Society, during which the bones of various extinct animals were found in several situations.'* The most complete silence was observed respecting the 'flint knives,' a fact which is rendered the more significant by the following announcement, which is always printed on the wrapper: "The Editor of the Quarterly Journal is directed to make it known to the public, that the authors alone are responsible for the facts and opinions contained in their respective papers.' It may be inferred from the foregoing statement that, twenty years ago, the great majority of scientific as well as unscientific men concurred in the opinion that the human race had not occupied this planet for a longer period than from six to seven thousand years. It was not that the proposition of the commingling of human implements with the remains of extinct animals was new to them, for it had been previously and emphatically enunciated by men well qualified for the work, who had made extensive and careful investigations in caverns and elsewhere. As early as 1828, the Rev. J. MacEnery, who had spent the leisure of three years in exploring portions of Kent's Cavern, announced that there was 'no longer a question of the actual presence of flint implements under the stratified unbroken floor of stalagmite; and when Dr Buckland suggested that the ancient Britons had scooped out ovens in the stalagmite, and that through them the knives got admission to the diluvium below,' he refused to admit the hypothesis, pointed out its utter inadequacy to meet the facts of the case, and closed the discussion by remarking: 'It is painful to dissent from so high an authority, and more particularly so from my concurrence generally in his views of the phenomena of these caves, which three years' personal observation has in most every instance enabled me to verify.'† * Quarterly Journal Geological Society, vol. iii. p. 353 (1847), In 1833, the late Dr Schmerling of Liége published the results of his labours in the numerous caverns in the basin of the Meuse.* From his work, it appears that the floors of many of the caverns were of unbroken stalagmite; that in the cave-earth below, he found remains of extinct and recent animals commingled, and with them, in a few of the caves, the bones of man, including skulls, teeth, and bones of the extremities; that the human remains were of the same colour, and in the same condition as to the amount of gelatine they contained, as those of the accompanying animals; that they were so rolled and scattered as to shew that they were not intentionally buried on the spot; that rude flint implements were dispersed generally through the cave-earth in all the caverns; and that in the cave of Chokier, he discovered a polished and jointed needle-shaped bone, with a hole pierced obliquely through its base.† In 1840, Mr Godwin-Austen read to the Geological Society of London a paper 'On the Bone-caves of Devonshire.' Speaking of Kent's Hole, in which he had laboured, he says: 'Works of art, such as arrow-heads and knives of flint, occur in all parts of the cave, and throughout the entire thickness of the clay; and no distinction founded on condition, distribution, or relative position can be observed, whereby the human can be separated from the other reliquiæ.' He adds: 'The bones' (of the cave-mammals) ' and the works of man must have been introduced into the cave before the flooring of the stalagmite had been formed.' The early inquirers, however, did not confine their researches to caverns. In 1847, the late M. Boucher de Perthes published the first volume of his Antiquités Celtiques, in which he described some rude unpolished flint implements, which, during the preceding six years, had been found, with bones of elephant, rhinoceros, bear, hyena, stag, ox, and horse, at various depths down to thirty feet from the surface, in sand and gravel, in the valley of the Somme, near Abbeville in Picardy. Whilst the author, however, was satisfied that the 'implements' had really been made by man, many of his readers regarded them as accidental natural products; and others, admitting their human origin, believed that M. de Perthes had been imposed on by the workmen. His work, in short, fell as harmlessly on the public as did the Report of the Torquay Committee, which, as has been stated, was read the same year. Nevertheless, within twelve years from that time, a revolution was produced in the opinions of many leading geologists and archæologists. This has not only been sustained by subsequent discoveries, but at present there are certainly very few, probably none, really acquainted with the evidence, who would accept for man the short chronology with Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles Découverts dans les Cavernes de la Province de Liége. Liége, 1833. + See Lyell's Antiquity of Man, 1863, pp. 63-74. Trans. Geol. Soc. of London, second series, vol. vi. part ii. pp. 433-489. which a dozen years ago they were not only content but refused to part. We now proceed to state very briefly to what this remarkable and sudden change was due. The fishing-town of Brixham, on the southern shore of Torbay, occupies three valleys and the slopes of the four limestone hills which they separate. One of the latter, known as Windmill Hill, reaches the height of 175 feet above mean tide, is bounded on the south by Mudstone Bay, and on the other three sides by deep abrupt valleys. At one hundred feet above mean tide, a road runs along its northern and western sides, and at its base, on the north, is the principal street of the town which communicates with the busy harbour. At present, this street at the north-west angle of the hill is seventy-five feet below the road just mentioned, but within the recollection of persons still living, the sea at high tides reached this point. It is now permanently shut out by the lodgment of rubbish for the formation of the street, by which the bottom of the valley has been artificially raised about fifteen feet. In November 1857, a dyer named Philp purchased of the Commissioners for the Enclosure of Waste Lands the freehold of a small triangular plot of ground at the north-west angle of the hill, and extending towards its summit from the road already mentioned. As soon as he entered on his purchase, Mr Philp proceeded to convert it into a quarry. During the quarrying operations in January 1858, the removal of a block of limestone disclosed in a north-and-south joint a small vertical hole about sufficiently large to admit a man's fist. A day or two afterwards the workmen missed one of their 'jumpers,' or boring-tools, and supposed it had been stolen. A few days subsequently, a thick block of limestone was quarried at the same spot, and the hole previously noticed was found to be large enough for a man to pass through it. The quarrymen, in fact, had broken into a conical cavity descending vertically into the limestone. Drawn by curiosity to the spot, Mr Philp found the hole to be of no great depth, and at the bottom he saw his lost jumper. He at once descended to recover the tool, when he found himself in a long narrow tunnel. Having obtained a light, he proceeded to explore, and found the tunnel ran southwards into the hill for about fifty feet, whence a second gallery extended westwards. The floor was a continuous sheet of stalagmite, having bones attached to or projecting through it. Returning to the hole through which he had descended, he found reason to believe that the space between his cavern and the road was not occupied with limestone, but with a mass of natural concrete formed of small angular fragments of limestone and stalagmitic matter. A few days' work sufficed to shew the correctness of this opinion, and to lay open a natural entrance to the cavern. Almost immediately, negotiations were opened with the proprietor for the purpose of making a careful and systematic exploration ; a lease was ultimately secured; at midsummer 1858 the exploration was commenced by a committee under the auspices of the Royal and Geological Societies of London, and the work was completed at the end of one year. At the meeting of the British Association held at Leeds in September 1858, a member of the committee read a paper on the results which had been obtained, and of which the following is a brief summary: The deposits were, first, or uppermost, a floor of stalagmite, varying from a few inches to upwards of a foot in thickness. Second, cave-earth, composed of red ochreous loam and angular pieces of limestone, and containing rolled fragments of quartz, greenstone, and brown hematite of iron. Though deposits capable of yielding the rounded materials exist in the Brixham district, none of them could have been derived from Windmill Hill; nor could they at present reach it without crossing one of the deep valleys by which it is bounded. Third, or lowest, gravel, mainly consisting of well-rounded fragments of quartz and greenstone, having a tendency to become a more or less firm conglomerate. Several bones were found on and in the stalagmite, of which two only require to be mentioned here. The first was a fine antler of a reindeer, firmly cemented to, but rising in bold relief from, the upper surface of the floor. The second, a humerus of the extinct cave-bear, lying completely within the stalagmite, about midway in its thickness. The bones in the cave-earth were those of the ordinary cavemammals. It was the practice of the workmen, on discovering a bone, to pick carefully away the surrounding matrix before attempting to dislodge it. On one occasion, however, they were directed to cut out intact a mass of the cave-earth in which portions of a few large bones were visible. Subsequently, the late Dr Falconer, by removing the matrix, laid bare the entire left hind-leg of the cavebear, having all the bones, even the patella and astragalus, in their true anatomical positions. None of the very few bones which the underlying gravel yielded were of any importance. Upwards of thirty implements and flakes of flint were found; the greater number in the cave-earth, and the rest in the gravel below. Not only were they all beneath the stalagmitic floor, but they were all from nine inches to upwards of twenty feet below its nether surface; whilst nearly forty per cent. of all the bones met with in the cavern were above the uppermost implement or flake. Taken as a whole, the implement zone was lower than that of the bones. Except in one limited locality, all the objects lay in such a position with regard to the plane of the cave-earth bed, as to betoken the action of a small stream of water which must have flowed continuously through the cavern in one uniform direction. The following are the principal inferences drawn from the facts by those most familiar with them. 1. The detrital accumulations |