If the Reverend John MacEnery (1796-1841), an obscure Catholic priest of Torquay, had not died prematurely, he might have been honoured at the present day with the title of ‘Father’ of English Prehistory. During the first five years of the reign of George IV he made discoveries which undoubtedly proved the existence in England of a prehistoric race more ancient than that hitherto known to archaeologists—Palaeolithic Man. But the conservatism of the scientific world of his day little encouraged, him to press home his discoveries; while lack of funds and ill-health prevented him from bringing them before the public in book form.

As a foreword to the story of MacEnery’s ‘ Systematic observations of Kent’s Hole and other caverns’ in South Devon, of which his monument in the parish churchyard of Tor proclaims him to have been the pioneer, one must recall the state at that period of this type of scientific investigation.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, geology was but emerging from an elementary stage, and as a separate science and recognised under that name it was barely fifty years old. The work of cave research, however, had been pushed forward in Germany about the end of the eighteenth century; and Cuvier’s marvellous identification of the extinct mammalia from fossil fragments had given it further impetus. In England papers had been read to the Royal Society, in 1817 and 1821, describing fossil bones discovered by workmen while quarrying limestone, at Oreston, for the Plymouth breakwater.