ABSTRACT

William Pengelly, a Devon schoolmaster, found flint tools beneath a sheet of stalagmite containing fossil animal remains at Windmill Hill cave near Brixham in 18589, and his work had a profound effect upon that of Lyell and Prestwich. Pengelly himself was strongly uniformitarian in outlook and, in a geological work published in 1864, held that the valleys of east Devon were excavated by streams and that the Triassic outliers had been isolated by denudation (Pengelly, 1864, pp. 47 and 50).