OXFORDSHIRE.-KENT.-OXWICH BAY. XIV. 427 At Watlington park, Oxfordshire, at the depth of fifty or sixty feet, CHAP. were found many whole oaks, one upright, and one upright reversed, hazel nuts, a stag's head and antlers, sound, not discoloured; and on the same spot, two Roman urns. Dr. Plott's Hist. Oxf. p. 161. "In 1668, at Chartham, Kent, at the depth of seventeen feet, a parcel of monstrous bones, and four teeth, were dug up, which agree with a late description of the grinders of the elephant. Some are of opinion that they are bones of elephants, abundance of which were brought over by the Emperor Claudius, who landed at Sandwich." Hasted's Kent, III. 155. Note.-Chartham is on the road to London. At Bowden Parva, Northamptonshire, two tusks of an elephant. Selections, Gent.'s Mag. II. 462. At Paviland, near Oxwich bay, South Wales, bones of the rhinoceros, hyæna, deer, ox, elephant, bear, wolf, fox, horse, water rat, man, birds, and modern bones of sheep, &c. Professor Buckland. Note. At Neath, fourteen miles north-east, there is a Roman encampment of great extent, and several small intrenchments: further on, above thirty miles, is Caerleon, where there was a Roman amphitheatre. See Rees's Encyc. "Neath." At Chester, were found marks of Roman sacrifices, heads, horns, &c. 428 RUGBY.-CORNWALL.-PLYMOUTH. CHAP. of the ox, roebuck, &c.: and with them two coins of Vespasian and XIV. Constantius.-Pennant's Wales, Vol. I. At Newnham, near Rugby, three tusks, curved outwards, like those of Siberia, and other elephants' bones, stags' bones, and two rhinoceros' skulls. At Lawford, near Rugby, bones of a hyena, elephant, and rhi noceros. Note.-Newnham is one mile east of the Roman fosse way, and five miles west of the Roman highway. Lawford is a mile and a half east of the fosse way, and five and a half west of the highway: and not a mile to the south of Newnham Regis. Rugby is distant about three miles, and is the Tripontio of the Romans."-See Horsley, Brit. Rom. p. 436. 66 "A farmer at Bossens, in the parish of Erth, at the depth of eighteen feet, found a Roman patera, and, six feet deeper, a jug; and, digging further, they found another patera intermixed with sacrificial fragments of horns, bones of several sizes, half burnt sticks, and fragments of worn out shoes. In the field near, there are remains of a fort, one hundred and fifty-two feet long, one hundred and thirty-six broad; the fosse, outside, is still discoverable."-Borlace's Cornwall, p. 316. At Oreston, near Plymouth, bones of bears, rhinoceroses, and deer. All this quarry had been worked by blasting through the solid rock: here and there are a few small caverns similar to that where the bones MENDIP HILLS.-BRISTOL. were discovered; but none of them had the appearance of connection with the surface, or with each other.-Phil. Trans. 1821, p. 134. And of the horse, ox, hyæna, wolf, deer, and tiger.—Professor Buckland, Second Edition, p. 72. Note.-Plymouth is the Tamari Ostea of the Romans, whose custom it was to blast the rocks in the mines.-Pennant's Wales, I. p. 55. 429 CHAP. XIV. At Hutton, Mendip hills, bones of horses, stags, oxen, fox, hog. At Sandford, deer, elephant, and other bones. Ten miles from Bristol, an immensely large stag's horn. A gentleman was digging upon a high hill, near Mendip, for ochre and ore: at the depth of fifty-two fathoms, he found four grinders and two thigh bones of an elephant, well preserved in a bed of ochre.— Selections from Gent.'s Mag. II. 460, &c. "At Banwell, near the west extremity of the Mendip hills, some miners, in sinking a shaft in search of Calamine, intersected a steep and narrow fissure, which, after descending eighty feet, opened into a spacious cavern a hundred and fifty feet long, thirty wide, and twenty to thirty high. From the difficulty of descending by this fissure, it was judged desirable to make an opening in the side of the hill, a little below, in a line which might lead directly into the interior of the cave. This gallery had been conducted but a few feet, when the workmen suddenly penetrated another cavern of inferior dimensions to that which they were in search of, and found its floor to be covered, (to a depth which has not yet been ascertained), with a bed of sand, mud, and fragments of limestone, through which were dispersed an enormous quantity of bones, horns, and teeth. The thickness of this mass has been ascertained in one place to be nearly forty feet, 430 CHAP. CALAMINE. chiefly of the ox, and deer tribes: of the latter, there are several varieties, including the elk, a few portions of the skeleton of a wolf, and of a gigantic bear. The bones are in a state of preservation equal to that of common grave bones; although it is clear, from the fact of some of them belonging to the great extinct bear species, that they are of antediluvian origin*. In the roof of the cave, there is a large chimney-like opening, which appears to have communicated formerly with the surface, but which is choked up with fragments of limestone, interspersed with mud and sand, and adhering together imperfectly by a stalagmitic incrustation. Through this aperture it is probable the animals fell into the cave and perished, in the period preceding the inundation by which it was filled up. In this manner cattle are continually lost by falling into similar apertures in the limestone hills of Derbyshire. There is nothing to induce a belief that it was a den inhabited by hyænas, like the cave at Kirkdale, or by bears, like those in Germany: its leading circumstances are similar to those of the ossiferous cavities in the limestone rock at Oreston, near Plymouth."-Phil. Mag. December, 1824. Note.-A Roman road runs through Bomium (Axbridge) to Bristol. (Horsley, p. 464). Of the fore-mentioned places, Hutton is within six miles, Sandford within one, and Banwell within two and a half miles of the Roman Road. This last-mentioned collection at Banwell, is probably in a Roman mine. "Calamine," says Pennant, “the Cadmia of Pliny, (Lib. XXXIV. Ch. X.), and the stone Cadmia of Strabo, abounds in the mineral part of this island. The Romans knew its uses in the making of brass; therefore they cannot be supposed to have over See the remarks on animals deemed extinct, Ch. XVIII. The Romans had Numidian bears; which are probably not known by the moderns. See Herodotus, Melpomene CXCI. and note 188. A CAVE OF FOSSIL BONES. looked so necessary an ingredient. The remains of the brass founderies discovered in our kingdom, shew that they were acquainted with it. The knowledge of this mineral, in after ages, was long lost. Before the reign of Elizabeth much was imported from Sweden, but at that period it was discovered again in the Mendip hills; and, fortunately, at the same time that the working of the copper mines in Cumberland was renewed. Our country abounds with it; but, till within these sixty years, we were so ignorant of its value, as to mend our roads with it."-Tour in Wales, Vol. I. P. 66. From a consideration of the foregoing circumstances, the writer's conjecture is, that the cave of bones was an exhausted portion of the mine, converted into an ossuary, by the miners, for the remains of the oxen and deer which they fed on. It is also probable, that a military guard was stationed at the mines. It will naturally be asked, why they should so carefully throw the bones into so secret and secure a place? to which it may be replied, that these bones might attract the wolves, and endanger their lives; they thus prevented that risk. Every English reader knows, that king Edgar commuted the punishment for crimes, into the acceptance of a certain number of wolves' tongues, from each criminal. In Wales, the taxes of gold and silver were converted into a tribute of wolves' heads. In after times, rewards were offered, and lands were held on condition of destroying the wolves. 431 CHAP. XIV. "In my last I told you that my lord of Cherbury was appointed by his Majesty to make inquiry touching the bones found near Gloucester. His lordship shewed me the bones he had collected, which were a huckle bone, part of the shoulder blade, some parts of a tooth, |