A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE man or his handiwork has been found in the caverns and fissures of the carboniferous limestone in the county, but several small cavities in the magnesian limestone at Creswell on the north-eastern border have yielded results unsurpassed in this country, except by those of Kent's Hole at Torquay. The discovery that these cavities contained relics of the past was made by the Rev. J. Magens Mello, M.A., in April, 1875, and this led to his excavation of one of them, a fissure known as the Pin Hole. In this he found, underlying a thin surface soil which contained relics ranging from Roman times to the present, a thick damp sand charged with a multitude of mammalian bones of Pleistocene age. He then proceeded to excavate a neighbouring cavity, known as Robin Hood's Cave, finding there several distinct beds with numerous rude implements associated with these mammalian bones, and overlaid as before with a veneer of surface soil containing ' Recent ' remains. In the following year, 1876, the work was carried on under the auspices of a committee, with Mr. Mello as director, and Professor Boyd Dawkins and the late Mr. Thomas Heath, Curator of the Derby Museum, as superintendents. By the end of the summer, Robin Hood's Cave and another cave, the Church Hole, were thoroughly investigated, with results similar to those of the preceding year. The number of bones and implements found during this investiga- tion was enormous. In 1876 2,726 bones and 1,040 implements were obtained from the Pleistocene deposits of Robin Hood's Cave, while from those of the Church Hole the numbers were 1,604 an( ^ 2 34 re ~ spectively. The implements had a general resemblance to those of the same age in Kent's Cavern and many of the continental caves. Those of the lowest beds were of the ' rudest possible construction,' consisting of quartzite pebbles which had been used without any preparation for hammers, crushers and pot-boilers ; or rudely chipped, so as to enable them to be more easily handled ; or the flakes therefrom adapted, by a little additional chipping, for scrapers, knives or hatchets. In the higher (and newer) beds, quartzite was replaced by flint, fabricated into simple forms at first, then more complex as the topmost beds were reached ' well-made lance-heads, chipped on both faces,' and ' delicately-made borers and scrapers,' implements approaching the Solutre type, in fact. With these occurred bone needles, pins, awls and arrow-heads, such as have been found in Kent's Cavern. But the most remarkable object was the incised sketch of the head and forequarters of an unmistakable Pleistocene horse on a piece of flat bone, ' the first trace of pictorial art yet discovered in Great Britain.' The similarity of this Derbyshire drawing and the associated implements to those found in deposits of the same era in Switzerland and Aquitaine ' affords the clearest proof that the hunters of Southern France and Switzerland had found their way along the eastern valley now covered with the waters of the German ocean, and wandered as far north as the borders of Yorkshire.' Not only did the investigation prove beyond a doubt the co-exist- ence of man with the migrated and extinct mammals of the Pleistocene, 164
