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CAVE IMPLEMENTS.
[CHAP. XXII.

the state of preservation of the tusks at the time of their being manufactured must have been better than is usual in caverns, though fossil ivory from Siberia is still employed for making knife-handles and for other purposes; and an elephant's tusk, found in a clay deposit in the Carse of Falkirk[1] was sold to an ivory-turner and cut up into pieces for the lathe before it could be rescued. The late Dr. Falconer,[2] suggested that the ivory articles may have been imported, and have had no connection with the older tusks. Be this as it may, the case is not one on which to insist; and I therefore pass on at once to a consideration of those caves in Britain in which the occurrence of stone instruments of human manufacture, in close association with the relics of extinct animals, and under such circumstances as prove a vast antiquity, are thoroughly well authenticated.

KENT'S CAVERN, TORQUAY.

The notices of this well-known cave by various authors, prior to 1859, have been carefully collected and published by the late Mr. Pengelly, F.R.S.,[3] but of these, it is needless to cite here more than the accounts given by the Rev. J. MacEnery, F.G.S., Mr. R. A. C. Godwin-Austen, F.R.S., and Mr. E. Vivian.

MacEnery, who for many years was chaplain at Tor Abbey, having had his attention first directed to the cave by the discovery in it of fossil bones, during the year 1824–5, by Mr. Northmore and the late Sir W. C. Trevelyan, devoted himself in the most enthusiastic manner to an examination of the contents of the cavern, and with the most successful results. He prepared for the press an account of his "Cavern Researches," for which numerous plates were engraved, apparently by the aid of Dr. Buckland, but he did not live to publish it, and it was first printed in a somewhat abridged form by Mr. Vivian in the year 1859. The whole of what remained of his MS. has, however, since been published verbatim, by Mr. Pengelly.[4] He relates the discovery in the upper deposits of numerous relics, such as flakes and nuclei of flint, polished celts of syenite and greenstone, bone pins, and long

  1. Wilson's "Preh. Ann. of Scot.," vol. i. p. 48.
  2. "Pal. Mem.," vol. ii. p. 522.
  3. Trans. Devonsh. Assoc., vol. ii. p. 469; iii. 191; iv. 467. To this paper I am largely indebted.
  4. L. c., vol. iii. p. 203.