influence on the subsequent progress of opinion in France, I shall interrupt my account of the researches made in the Valley of the Somme, by a brief notice of those which were carried on in 1858 in Devonshire with more than usual care and scientific method. Dr. Buckland, in his celebrated work, entitled 'Reliquiæ Diluvianæ,' published in 1823, in which he treated of the organic remains contained in caves, fissures, and 'diluvial gravel' in England, had given a clear statement of the results of his own original observations, and had declared that none of the human bones or stone implements met with by him in any of the caverns could be considered to be as old as the mammoth and other extinct quadrupeds. Opinions in harmony with this conclusion continued until very lately to be generally in vogue in England; although about the time that Schmerling was exploring the Liége caves, the Rev. Mr. M'Enery, a Roman Catholic priest, residing near Torquay, had found in a cave one mile east of that town, called 'Kent's Hole,' in red loam covered with stalagmite, not only bones of the mammoth, tichorhine rhinoceros, cave-bear, and other mammalia, but several remarkable flint tools, some of which he supposed to be of great antiquity, while there were also remains of man in the same cave of a later date.[1]
About ten years afterwards, in a 'Memoir on the Geology of South Devon,' published in 1842 by the Geological Society of London,[2] an able geologist, Mr. Godwin-Austen, declared that he had obtained in the same cave (Kent's Hole)
- ↑ The MS. and plates prepared for a joint memoir on Kent's Hole, by Mr. M'Enery and Dr. Buckland, have recently been published by Mr. Vivian of Torquay, from which, as well as from some of the unprinted MS., I infer that Mr. M'Enery only refrained out of deference to Dr. Buckland from declaring his belief in the contemporaneousness of certain flint implements of an antique type and the bones of extinct animals. Two of these implements from Kent's Hole, figured in Plate 12 of the posthumous work above alluded to, approach very closely in form and size to the common Abbeville implements.
- ↑ Transactions of Geological Society, 2nd series, vol. vi. p. 444.
