Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/400

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374
THE ZOOLOGIST.

third bed, found forty feet apart, in two distinct but adjacent galleries, and one a month before the other, proved to be parts of one and same nodule-tool; and I have little or no doubt that it had been washed out of the fourth bed and re-deposited in the third. The hammer-stone was a quartzite pebble, found in the upper portion of the fourth bed, and'bore distinct marks of the use to which it was applied- Speaking of the discovery of the tools just mentioned, Mr. Prestwich said in 1859:— "It was not until I had myself witnessed the conditions under which flint implements had been found at Brixhara, that I became fully impressed with the validity of the doubts thrown upon the previously prevailing opinions with respect to such remains in caves" (Phil. Trans. 1860, p. 280); and according to Sir C. Lyell, writing in 1863:—"A sudden change of opinion was brought about in England respecting the probable co-existence, at a former period, of man and many extinct mammalia, in consequence of the results obtained from the careful exploration of a cave at Brixham.... The new views very generally adopted by English geologists had no small influence on the subsequent progress of opinion in France" (Antiquity of Man, pp. 96, 97).

Bench Cavern.—Early in 1861 information was brought me that an ossiferous cave had just been discovered at Brixham, and, on visiting the spot, I found that, of the limestone quarries worked from time to time in the northern slope of Furzeham Hill, one known as Bench Quarry, about half a mile due north of Windmill Hill Cavern, and almost overhanging Torbay, had been abandoned in 1839, and that work had been recently resumed in it. It appeared that in 1839 the workmen had laid bare the greater part of a vertical dyke, composed of red clayey loam and angular pieces of limestone, forming a coherent wall-like mass, 27 feet high, 12 feet long, 2 feet in greatest thickness, and at its base 123 feet above sealevel. In the face of it lay several fine relics of the ordinary cave mammals, including an entire left lower jaw of Hyæna spelæa replete with teeth, but which had nevertheless failed to arrest the attention of the incurious workmen who exposed it, or of any one else. Soon after the resumption of the work in 1861, the remnant of the outer wall of the fissure was removed, and caused the fall of an incoherent part of the dyke, which it had previously supported. Amongst the débris the workmen collected some hundreds of specimens of skulls, jaws, teeth, vertebra, portions of antlers, and bones, but no indications of man. Mr. Wolston, the proprietor, sent some