the leptorrhine rhinoceros* went trooping through the woods and jungles, and the great river-horse, quite as bulky as that of Africa,† gambolled and wallowed in the rivers and ponds. The bison ‡ and the huge ox§ fed on the plains. NIGHT.||―The fifth great day is fading into the shadowy past, and the last faint and dying light reveals a scene of ever-gathering gloom and desolation. For years and years the cold has been growing more and more bitter, the lingering chilly springs are followed by shorter summers and longer and more unbroken winters. There is an Arctic look about everything; and in every wood and valley, in every stream and bay, creatures fitted to brave the perishing cold of Siberia and Spitzbergen have usurped the domains of the less hardy tropic races. The woolly-haired mammoth has displaced the old elephant and the elephant of the south, the rhinoceros is clothed like the mammoth in wool, the beaver builds by the icy stream, and the Siberian hare squats beside the willowbush or the stunted hazel. The horse and hog, the elk and reindeer, have succeeded to the pachyderm and crocodile, the woods ring with the roar of the northern lion and hyæna, and in the seas arctic shells and narwhals have followed the cowrie and nautilus. *See Appendix 7. + "The hippopotamus is first met with in pliocene strata.”—Owen. The Bison priscus. § The Bos antiquus. See Appendix 8. The pleistocene. A narwhal was stranded on the beach near Boston so late as 1800. When the shell and sand banks of Norfolk and Suffolk anterior The mammoth or gigantic northern elephant,* which now fed on the young pines and willows or plunged through the tangled woods of birch and hazel, sojourned so long in the land that from a bank off the little village of Happisburgh in Norfolk, upwards of two thousand of its grinders have been dredged up by the fishermen within thirteen years; and even this is not the richest locality, as the coast from Essex to Norfolk swarms with them. It was of colossal size, the skeleton having been made out as long in some cases as thirty-two feet and fifteen feet high. It had enormous curved tusks which turned upwards and then backwards till they came nearly to its brow; they were quite ten feet long and rooted fifteen inches in its head. One belonging to a male mammoth was found in Essex, nine feet along the outer curve and two feet nine inches round at the thickest part, another dredged up off Dungeness was eleven feet long. The ivory is often so little altered that it can be used for carving and turning. The mammoth was clothed with long red hair, and still more to protect it against the cold, there was an undergrowth of crisp wool about an inch long. That found in 1803 had besides, a covering of black bristles twelve to sixteen inches long, a provision which very likely obtained with those in England. Of all the old English elephants the mammoth was the most numerous, had the longest career, and extended its range over the largest territory. It has been to the Norwich crag are cut through, a regular change from the tropic shells to arctic forms of shell life is revealed. * The elephas primigenius, or latest form of the elephant found in temperate latitudes. met with not only in England and northern Europe but even in Italy. The reader has most probably heard how frequently the tusks of this animal are found in Siberia, and that several carcases have been discovered preserved in ice with the flesh and hair almost intactso fresh indeed, that when the ice melted away the wolves fed on the bodies; most probably when the country became quite arctic it migrated in winter, but it certainly returned after the great glacial time, for remains are found in the gravel and even in caves of a time after the ice deluge. All the three species of elephant we have spoken of have been found at Cromer. Only one kind does not appear in England at all, namely, the dwarf elephants of Malta, about the size of a pony, found in a cave in that island along with remains of immense swans, said to be three or four times larger than any living swan, and of an equally immense dormouse. Could the little elephants, covered with shaggy hair, seen by Bishop Heber on the lower range of the Himalayas, and which seem from that time forth to have vanished out of human ken, have been the last lingerers and pilgrims of the species? What has been said of the dimensions of the mammoth and some other monsters of the eld must seem so marvellous, that an incredulous reader might well ask if Science had not borrowed Fancy's painted wings. How then will he receive the intimation that, vast as are the proportions spoken of, they do not impress the mind half so much as one single glance at the skeletons themselves? For so bulky were many of the pre-Adamite creatures, that they were far thicker in proportion to their height and length than any modern elephant. If the reader will pay a visit to the British Museum and inspect the skull of the great extinct armadillo, as big as a small clumsy boat, or the skeletons of the great sloth and the American elephant, he will feel no incredulity as to this statement. At the Crystal Palace the impression of the great size of the saurians is lost in the space; they should be seen in a room. Yet to build the model of the iguanodon there, even according to Professsor Owen's cautious estimate of its size, which is now known to be too low, took six hundred bricks, six hundred and fifty two-inch half-round drain-tiles, thirty-eight casks of cement, and ninety casks of broken stone. When the mould of the monster's carcase was ready, Mr. Hawkins entertained Professors Owen and Forbes and twenty scientific friends to dinner in it. The limbs of these creatures were thick in proportion. The leg of the water-mole must have been nearly as large round as the body of a small pony; the arm-bone of the mastodon was quite was quite three feet in girth at its thickest part; the thigh-bone of one great sloth is larger, being also nearly half as thick through as it is long. Along with the mammoth there was also, as has been said, a great wool-clad two-horned rhinoceros, which, besides prevailing in many other places, swarmed about the site of London, and an enormous tiger-like animal-indeed, by some writers it has been named the British tiger,* and has often been stated to be as large again as the largest Asiatic species of tiger; if coloured like that of Bengal, it * See Appendix 9... : must have been the most magnificent creature that ever trod the earth. By other writers it is now called the sabre-tooth.* No doubt, I believe, is felt that this sabre-tooth, for such is its name, was not a tiger it was a most savage brute, somewhat akin to the cat tribe, but of even a fiercer nature, and really belonging to a genus now altogether lost. It was provided with weapons which rendered it, if possible, more formidable than any modern savage of the jungle or the desert, its teeth being perfect sabres. This destructive beast varied in size from that of a leopard to the bigness of a lion. It was a native of Devonshire, possibly of many other parts; but wherever it appeared it must have been the terror of every living thing, except perhaps the great elephant. At Banwell in Somersetshire, not very far from the haunts of this savage of the forest and plain, have been found the remains of a very fine kind of lion. Those of our day must therefore have fallen off in more respects than one; for the strongest african lion could not endure the cold of the Baltic, yet the Somerset unprotected, for a single winter; lion seems to have tolerated the same climate as the reindeer, remains of which have been found in the same deposit in East Dereham. Hyænas too, many of them bigger than the largest tigers of our day, rent the night air with their hideous yells. Owen thinks that the great english hyæna was * The machairodus. It is found in the miocene in France and Germany, in the pliocene in Italy, and in the cave breccia in Devonshire. + See Appendix 10. |