inued torrential action or of some sudden
cataclysm. As the land rose, these creatures for the most part betook
themselves to lower levels, and in process of time the cavern stood
upon a hill-side, perhaps several hundreds of feet above the sea; and
the mountain streams, their beds not yet emptied of glacial detritus,
washed into it stones and mud, and probably bones also, while it
appears that hyenas occupied the cave at intervals, and dragged in
remains of mammals of many species which had now swarmed across the
plains elevated out of the sea, and multiplied in the land. This was
the time of the cave earth; and before its deposit was completed,
though how long before an unstratified and therefore probably
often-disturbed bed of this kind can not tell, man himself seems to
have been added to the inhabitants of the British land. In pursuit of
game he sometimes ascended the valleys beyond the cavern, or even
penetrated into its outer chambers; or perhaps there were even in
those days rude and savage hill-men, inhabiting the forests and
warring with the more cultivated denizens of plains below, which are
now deep under the waters. Their weapons, and other implements dropped
in the cavern or lost in hunting, or buried in the flesh of wounded
animals which crept to the streams to assuage their thirst, are those
found in the cave earth. The absence of the human bones may merely
show that the mighty hunters of those days were too hardy, athletic,
and intelligent often to perish from accidental causes, and that they
did not use this cavern for a place of burial. The fragments of
charcoal show that they were acquainted with fire, and possibly that
they sometimes took shelter in the cave. But the land again subsided.
The valley of that now nameless river, of which the Rhine and the
Thames may have alike been tributaries, disappeared under the sea; and
perhaps some tribe, driven from the lower lands, took up its abode in
this cave, now again near the encroaching waves, and left there the
remains of their last repasts ere they were driven farther inland or
engulfed in the waters. For a time the cavern may have been wholly
submerged, and the charcoal of the extinguished fires became covered
with its thin coating of clay. But ere long it re-emerged to form part
of an island, long barren and desolate; and the valleys having been
cut deeper by the receding waters, it no longer received muddy
deposits, and the crust formed by drippings