It does not appear that Brixham Cave had at any time been inhabited by man. It has no accumulation of split bones or broken tools, nor any traces of the hearth, as in Kent’s Hole, or in the Caves of Dordogne and the Pyrenees. But the men of the mammoth period had resorted thither occasionally,—for hiding, it may be, or in pursuit of their prey; and thus dropped the worked flints which now reveal the evidence of their presence. There is no trace of human bones, or any indication that man fell a prey to the powerful wild animals which chiefly haunted the cave. But he explored its recesses, in one case at least, to a distance of seventy-four feet from the entrance; and unless we suppose him to have groped his way thither, when in search of a more effectual hiding-place from some human foe, it seems no unfair surmise that he carried with him the illuminating torch. The extinguished hearths of the French Caves, as at Aurignac and the Vezère, leave no room to question man’s early acquaintance with fire. Nor does it seem to me probable that, under the rigorous climate to which he was exposed in that remote post-glacial period, he could fail, as man, to employ the art of fire-making to alleviate his necessities, even as is now done under corresponding exigencies by the Arctic Esquimaux. Nevertheless it is to be noted that the flint implements found in Brixham Cave are of the rudest character; and like other specimens of the worked-flints of the men of the Drift or Cave periods, indicate a very slight development of constructive skill: unless, as hereafter shown from analogous American examples, there may be reason to regard many of them as merely in the first stage of manufacture into weapons or tools. Kent’s Cavern yielded a greatly more varied illustration of primitive arts, such as barbed harpoon heads, bodkins, awls, and needles of bone. Like others found in the French Caves, they suggest comparison with the ingenious arts of the Esquimaux: and may also justify the inference that in milder regions, and under other favouring circumstances, contemporary man, then as now, manifested a higher intellectual vigour when free from the exhausting strain involved in the battle for life, either of the modern hyperborean, or of the post-glacial artificer of the cave period.