Page:The Ancient Stone Implements (1897).djvu/517

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FROM KENT'S CAVERN.
495

The point has unfortunately been damaged, so that it is impossible to say whether it exhibited any signs of use. One face of the implement is more convex than the other, and has been chipped in such a manner as to leave a sort of central ridge. This implement may have been derived from the breccia.

During the progress of the explorations[1] subsequent to the appearance of the former edition of this book, numerous other implements of flint and chert were discovered, closely resembling in form the implements from the river-gravels, and apparently of the age of St. Acheul or Chelles. Mr. Pengelly[2] has pointed out that these belong to the breccia at the base of the cave-deposits, rather than to the cave-earth above, in which thinner and more delicately-worked forms have been found. He considers that there was a considerable interval of time between the two deposits, and that there was a difference between the fauna of the one and of the other. I have an implement almost the exact counterpart of Fig. 388 from the Thetford gravels.


Fig. 388a.—Kent's Cavern. (6,022) 3/4

Another implement (No. 6022) found on Nov. 27th, 1872, at a depth of 16 inches in the undisturbed breccia, is by the kindness of the Plymouth Institution, shown in Fig. 388a. Its resemblance to Fig. 414 from Biddenham, near Bedford, is striking. The illustration is on the scale of three-fourths linear measure, instead of on the usual scale of one-half. From fifteen to twenty implements were found in the breccia and about seventy worked flints of various forms in the cave-earth.

Several implements, varying in size and slightly in form, but of the same general character as the first two described, have also been discovered in the cave. Some of these present an appearance of having been used for scraping a hard substance, a part of the edge towards the narrower end being worn away, leaving a sort of shoulder near the extremity. The wear on the two sides is from the opposite faces, as if the instrument had been turned over in the hand and used in the same direction, whichever edge was employed. MacEnery, in his Plate T, has engraved three instruments of this class, as Nos. 11, 12, and 13, and has remarked on the pointed ends being blunted,
  1. See Report Brit. Assoc. 1873, pp. 206, 209.
  2. Op. cit., p. 209.