scarcely yet lost. Every where we see indications of a remarkable period, whether suddenly or slowly terminated no one can yet say; but it is only now that we are beginning to discover amongst the remains of these singular groups indications of half-civilised men, who, like the animals of lower organisation, seem to have died out, and were subsequently replaced by others to whom a higher destiny was open. Careful inquiry, properly directed, may discover amongst the various gravels and deposits containing these remains some further indications of men, if not actual portions of human skeletons; and we may yet hope to read the history of our race in its infancy by records more varied and more suggestive than the rude flintknives hitherto found. At any rate, it is no trifling addition to the wide field of geological investigation, that these great questions of archæology and history are included within its domain.

But let us go a little further, and endeavour to make out somewhat more distinctly the associates of man during this period of drift and filling up of caverns. We may thus obtain an idea perhaps more clear and satisfactory both of the extent of the change in other animals, and the time that may be assumed to have been needed to produce such change without any violent disturbance of the natural order of things.

At this period, then, whatever the case may be with regard to the human race, there was, in what is now Western Europe, a large district occupied by land, although much of what is now land was then certainly covered by the sea. On this land, a portion of which reached to the latitude of Central Europe, the climate must have been excessively cold,-almost arctic in the inhospitable mountains of ice every where advancing towards the sea. Still further to the south were numerous islands, if not continuous land, covered with vegetation and peopled with various tribes of quadrupeds and birds, and probably (as we have seen) not without human inhabitants. These islands occupied chiefly those spots now at a great elevation above the sea, the lower plains being submerged, though probably not so deeply but that the icebergs would be stranded upon the numerous shoals that then approached the surface. The central plain of Europe, a large part of Asia north of the great Himalayan chain, an extensive tract of North America, a broad strip of South America east of the Andes, from the river La Plata southwards, and a part-no one can at present tell how large a part of Australia, were all then under water. It was on the portions of the ocean-floor of that day, defined as above, that the great deposits of the drift period took place. The floor is since raised, and the ocean has left it; some of the ancient land is now submerged, while other parts form the mountain-tops;

the sea now brings warm water instead of ice to our shores, and the drifted icebergs deposit their load in the middle of the broad Atlantic, instead of on shoals a thousand miles to the east or west. The climate has changed entirely; the vegetation and the inhabitants of land and sea have also changed more or less; but man, with his power of modifying his habits to his climate, has remained; and many animals of lower organisation, moving freely in water, and able to find for themselves those conditions of climate and food that are favourable, have also remained as his contemporaries.

It will be interesting to inquire what were those animals that were associated with man during this period, which is historically so remote, but geologically very recent,―animals, many of which have since died out, leaving no direct and unaltered descendants on the earth. They include some of many kinds, large and small, belonging to various countries; but it will not be possible to allude here to more than a few of the more remarkable varieties.

In the caves both of England and Germany, bones of bats are found buried with other bones under the stalagmite, as well as amongst the superficial mud. Two species at least are made out; one of them, the "great bat" of English naturalists, still living in similar places, and the other, the horse-shoe bat, also living still. In these curious animals, limited in distribution to sheltered and dark places, there has been, then, but little change.

Bears, of at least three kinds, certainly inhabited the land during the drift period. The brown bear of North Europe, which is said to have lived in Scotland less than a thousand years ago, had already been introduced, and was accompanied by two other species, both since extinct; one of them smaller and less fierce, the other much larger, and more resembling the grisly bear of north-western America. The great cavern bear, as the larger extinct species is called, must have equalled in size a large horse; and though certainly very powerful, and from the structure of its teeth and extremities able to defend itself against enemies, it probably fed more on vegetable than animal food, in this also resembling the grisly bear.

The badger, the polecat, and the stoat flourished with the three species of bear above described, but seem not to have since undergone any change, resisting the alteration of climate and the gradual increase of the human race better than the larger animals of approximate habits. Bones of all of them are found buried in caverns with those of extinct races. The otter was another existing species which at that time had been introduced into Europe, and has not since been destroyed.

Wolves abounded during the deposit of the drift, and cannot

yet be said to have passed away, except where the cultivation of land has rendered their existence impossible. The same species now common throughout Northern Europe then ranged over England also, and numerous individuals have left bones and teeth in the caves by the side of those of the bears, and also of the common dog, of which latter there seem to have been already many varieties, and of the fox.

The hyena is an animal combining many of the peculiarities of the canine and feline races. The largest of the groups to which it belongs, it includes species less destructive than many, the animals seeking rather dead carrion than the living prey. The teeth of the hyenas are admirably adapted to gnaw and crush bones, and the muscles of the jaw point out this as an important habit. At present animals of this kind are confined to Africa and the parts of Asia adjacent. Two well-marked species and one other are known; one only, the striped hyena, inhabiting Northern Africa and Asia, and the others found in South Africa near the Cape. One very remarkable extinct species, more like the spotted hyena of the south than the striped species of the north of Africa, has left abundant remains in caverns among the fossils of the drift period. This last species has been found in the principal caverns of England, Germany, France, and Belgium, and also in the unstratified drift of the same period. It is singular enough that the specimens from the latter localities are in a tolerably perfect state, not broken or gnawed, while those from the caverns almost always show marks of having been gnawed and broken by the teeth of their cannibal associates.

The hyena of the caves was an animal equally remarkable for size and strength, exceeding very greatly that of the spotted hyæna of the Cape, and attaining dimensions even larger than those of the largest tiger. The number of individuals of this species whose remains have been found in the English caverns is not only extremely large, but they belong to animals of all ages. It seems clear that the caverns were the dens and hidingplaces of these savage brutes, who dragged thither the deer or other prey they found while prowling about at night, and often, in default of other victims, fed on their own companions or offspring.

It is a common error to suppose that the larger carnivora are only met with where the climate is tropical, or warm and damp, and that a large development of animal life, especially of the larger races, is always accompanied by a vigorous vegetation. The contrary might almost be asserted as the usual condition in nature, as in South Africa, where are the largest known herds of wild animals, both carnivorous and herbivo

rous, they exist in tracts of country scantily covered with vegetation; and in Brazil, where the vegetation is so enormously multiplied, there seems hardly room for large animals. So also on the northern side of the great mountain chain of Asia and in the colder parts of North America, the larger carnivora are represented by lions, tigers, lynxes, and jaguars, with many other feline species.

In ancient times, during the arctic climate of the drift period, a great cavern-tiger ranged over England and all that then existed of Europe, accompanied by another species of tiger of smaller size, a leopard, a wild-cat, and some others, besides a very remarkable genus, now altogether lost, as large as the cavern-tiger, but provided with weapons rendering it, if possible, more formidable. Of these the cavern-tiger seems to have resembled the jaguar in its proportions, but was stronger and larger in the limbs and paws; the others were fully as large as the existing species, but all slightly different, except indeed the wild-cat; whilst the extinct machairodus, with its peculiar canine teeth, shaped like a sword (whence the name is derived), and having a saw-edge, was not only larger than any of these, but seems to have been, in spite of some bear-like affinities, a more destructive creature. It ranged over the whole of the northern temperate land from England to India, its remains having been found, though rarely and at intervals, across the two continents of Europe and Asia. Several species have already been made out.

Accompanying this striking list of ferocious and carnivorous animals, we find a corresponding group of vegetable feeders serving as their prey. The beaver, and a species of rodent of very large size closely allied to it, have been found, together with a large group of the more minute gnawing animals; but with these were also the gigantic races of which the representatives now are the Indian and African elephants, the rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and the tapirs of the Old and New World. From a period long antecedent to that of the drift, and down to a comparatively recent date, elephants and rhinoceroses seem to have abounded in northern latitudes both in Europe and America, ranging even to the borders of the Arctic Circle, wherever a tree-vegetation could live. So lately have they there died out, or so long have their fleshy and soft parts been embalmed in ice in those countries, that in the beginning of this century a perfect elephant was melted out of the icy cliffs of the river Lena in Siberia, which must have been suddenly entombed when in full health, and while living in a natural state in such a climate as still exists in the same parallel of latitude in Western Europe. The carcasses of a rhinoceros and other animals have been seen also; but these have been left where they were seen, while the

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skeleton of the elephant, the skin, and some of the hair and the contents of the stomach, were sent to St. Petersburg.

The bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses have been found very generally, both in cavern deposits and in the gravel of the drift period; so that no doubt can exist as to more than one kind of each having ranged over the whole of the land during the deposit of the various beds of gravel. They must also have been locally abundant, to account for the very numerous bones distributed wherever gravel appears, or where caverns exist. Of these, one of the elephants (the mammoth) grew occasionally to an enormous size, much exceeding that of the largest known Indian elephants, and was provided with tusks proportionally elongated and greatly curved. It may serve to give some idea of the abundance of these animals in England, if we mention the opinion of Mr. Woodward, that, from a bank off the little village of Happisburgh in Norfolk, upwards of two thousand grinders of the mammoth have been dredged up by the fishermen within thirteen years. And even this is by no means the richest locality, as all along the east coast of England, from Essex to Norfolk, the teeth and tusks of elephants seem to be among the commonest fossils dug up; while in the cliffs bordering the frozen arctic seas, the supply of tusks was at one time, and for a long while, so considerable as to render the importation of ivory from recently-killed elephants altogether unnecessary. It is remarked, indeed, by a traveller who published an account of the Laechow Islands on the north-eastern coast of Siberia, that one of these islands is little more than a mass of elephants' bones.

An equally gigantic and somewhat more massive animal than the elephant, but very closely allied to it-the mastodon-is now extinct; but during the drift period trod the wastes and fed on the tree-vegetation of Northern Europe, Asia, and America. The animals of this genus seem to have been even more widely spread than the elephant, ranging from the tropics both southwards and northwards, almost to the polar seas, and reaching back much farther in geological time. They were provided with a long proboscis, and were possibly more aquatic in their habits than elephants, approximating in form and habits to the hippopotamus, species of which have also been found embedded in the same deposits. Of these one was larger, and the other much smaller, than the species now inhabiting the Nile.

A well-marked species of rhinoceros of the two-horned group, provided with horns of remarkable size and strength, has been found both in gravel and caverns, and a complete skeleton was met with in a natural fissure at Wirksworth in Derbyshire, laid open by mining operations. Other bones of the same, and