(3) Filling the bottom of the cave was a hard breccia containing remains of bears, together with flint implements of a ruder type than those in the cave-earth.
"The implements," writes Mr Pengelly, "found in the Breccia the Ursine, or so far as is at present known, the most ancient of the Cavern periods were exclusively of flint and chert. They were much more rudely formed, more massive, less symmetrical in outline, and made by operating, not on flakes, but directly on nodules, of which portions of the original surface generally remain, and which were probably derived from supra-cretaceous gravels existing in great volume between Torquay and Newton Abbot, about 4 miles from the cavern… . The implements were by no means so abundant as those of the Cave-earth ; that is to say, a given volume of Breccia did not yield so many implements as on the average occurred in an equal volume of Cave-earth." (Ibid.)
Evidently this is the coup-de-poing of French writers, as may be seen from that figured on Pl. X., No. 30, which represents a typical specimen of these earliest cave implements.
Windmill Hill Cave.
Another discovery of a similar character was the Windmill Hill Cavern, at Brixham, explored in 1858, under the auspices of a committee appointed by the Royal and Geographical Societies of London. The first paper on the result of this investigation was read by Mr Pengelly in September 1858, at the meeting of the British Association then held at Leeds, in which it was announced that "eight flint tools (Pl. X., No. 15) had already been found in various parts of the cavern, all of them inosculating with bones of mammalia at depths varying from 9 to 42 inches in the cave-earth, on which lay a sheet of stalagmite from 3 to 8 inches thick, and having, within it and on it, relics of the lion, hyæna, bear, mammoth, rhinoceros, and reindeer."
This paper, to use the phraseology of Mr Pengelly, produced "a decided awakening," besides indirect results of the highest importance.
Cresswell Caves.
The remarkable discoveries made by the Rev. J. Magens Mello and Professor Boyd Dawkins in the caves of Cresswell Crags, on the north-east border of Derbyshire, are so well known through their description in Early Man in Britain
