the mammalia are Elephas antiquus, Rhinoceros leptorhinus (R. megarhinus, Christol), Hippopotamus major, species of horse, bear, ox, stag, &c. 66 We may readily conceive that the countries now drained by the Thames, the Somme, and the Seine, were, in the post-pliocene period, on the borders of two distinct zoological provinces, one lying to the north, the other to the south, in which case many species belonging to each fauna endowed with migratory habits, like the living musk-buffalo or the Bengal tiger, may have been ready to take advantage of any, even the slightest, change in their favour to invade the neighbouring province, whether in the summer or winter months or permanently for a series of years, or centuries. The Elephas antiquus and its associated Rhinoceros leptorhinus may have preceded the mammoth and tichorhine rhinoceros in the valley of the Thames, or both may have alternately prevailed in the same area in the post-pliocene period." No longer do the climatic varieties of zoological species-the various elephants and rhinoceri-found in the Thames Valley to-day impel us to imagine such agency as Milton has pictured for the origin of the seasons :— Some say he bid his angels turn askance The poles of earth twice ten degrees or more The more ordinary and imperceptible processes of Nature, in the gradual redistribution of the areas and proportions of land and water, seem adequate to account for the Arctic climate and zoology which the ancient Thames reveals to us. Many are the instances in the present terraqueous system of the earth to show that the varying distribution of land and sea is an efficient cause of abnormal climates in other latitudes than those of the Thames. Such are the explanations of existence of elephants and rhinoceri as wild and native inhabitants of the basin of the ancient Thames. *Antiquity of Man, pp. 156-159. Recapitulation. Great is the gulf that lies between the Thames of the poet and the painter, the Thames of commerce, of civic annals, of quaint mediæval life, when river sports and pageants afforded pleasant items for the chronicler, and the ancient Thames of the mammoth, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus. In these, its declining years, the mighty creature has fallen captive to man. With shrunken bulk and in a narrower channel the Thames now winds an imprisoned course. Its vaster life and meridian years were lived before human annals began. The Glacial Clay of Muswell Hill and the Essex Heights takes us back to the infant and aboriginal years of the Thames. The old alluvia which strews the plains and hills for miles away from the present channel of the river tells us of the forces that excavated so great a valley and filled it with waters of commensurate volume. The mud and the gravel of the old and deserted bed of the stream reveal to us the bones of strange and giant beasts of an old and obsolete zoological world. The ruined slope of the southern shore tells us of the destruction by subterranean forces of the original and symmetrical valley. The submerged forest at Plumstead tells us of revolutions in the land-surface around London, and of changes in the course of the Thames. Far back in the "speechless past," through distant eras of zoology and terraqueous arrangement, does the auto-biography of the Thames transport us. Vast is the period we have to allow for the sequence of Nature's processes. But in the strange and startling phenomena that confront us in these homely landscapes around London, and in the new chronology they seem to demand, we find nothing to invalidate the grand assurance that KNOWN UNTO GOD ARE ALL HIS WORKS FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD. LONDON: JUDD and Co., PHENIX PRINTING WORKS, DOCTORS' COMMONS. |