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CHAPTER VII.

THE MAMMOTH PERIOD.

THE tertiary deposits are referable to three great divisions, conaining subdivisions, some of marine, some of fresh water origin, and severally characterized by their fossil remains. The terms Eocene, Miocene, and Pleiocene, are applied to them in their respective order of superposition, as the lower, middle, and upper groups. The London basin belongs to the first of these divisions. When these congeries of beds were completed, and the bottom of the sea was elevated, a fresh water occupation of the district appears to have prevailed. And during the supremacy of this reign of the Naïads it was, that England was tenanted by herds of large quadrupeds, tigers, hyenas, and the companions of the untamable class, whose haunts are now in the Indian jungle, or the forests and prairies of America.

This has been denominated the Mammoth Epoch, when the elephant race literally swarmed over northern Europe, from Italy to the Arctic regions. Great Britain at this era formed part of the continent, or rather of the great series of lakes and marshy swamps which then prevailed. Hence only can geologists account for the identity of fossils scattered over this area. The organisms are all of a type, all of the remarkable orders now confined to warmer climes. And when we find these fossils cast up in every field from the same series of deposits-in Switzerland, on the banks of the Danube, through the plains of Siberia, and northern Russia-in the basins of the Rhine, and the whole of lower Germany-in the Netherlands, over central and northern France, the entire south and east coasts of England-we decipher in all this, not only the organic characters of the same period of

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time, but the connecting links of one and the same superficial portion of the globe.

This is a very remarkable chapter in the history of our island, whether we consider the mineral or animal arrangements that prevailed, and their relations to continental Europe. Here we contemplate the relics of herds of the larger mammals which then ranged over a quarter of the earth's surface, all now extinct; while, toward the close of the epoch, everything conspires to favor the notion, that our insular position was then, for the first time, established.

The type of the period is the Mammoth, or the Elephas Primogenius. There are only two existing species, namely, the Asiatic, which is limited to within 31° north latitude, and the African, whose range extends to the shores of the Pacific, as far south as the Cape of Good Hope. America, through all its forests and boundless wastes, possesses not a single individual of the modern family, while the remains of the extinct race are to be found in every prairie, along the banks of the Missouri, and abundantly in the great salt marshes, whither they had resorted in vast herds in quest of the salt, and been mired, as heavy animals are frequently at the present day. The intertropical plains of the new world, and the polar regions of the old, were equally congenial to their habits. Nay, so adaptive were they in their nature and tastes these gigantic pachyderms of the middle tertiary periodthat in every intermediate country, they have left in their huge skeletons unequivocal traces of their sojourn or migration.

From the British strata alone, no less than three thousand and upward of fossil teeth have been dug up belonging to this colossal animal. These are found chiefly in the drift along the east coast of England, from Robin Hood's Bay, near Whitby, to Holderness. In a period of little more than thirteen years, the fishermen of the village of Happisburgh have dragged up more than two thousand grinders of the mammoth. In the valley of the Thames the relics have been discovered very numerously, at Sheppey, Woolwich, the Isle of Dogs, Lewisham,—in the gravel beneath the streets of London,-at Kensington, Kew, Wallingford, Oxford,—and all around the south-east coast from Brighton to Lyme-Regis, in Dorsetshire. The central counties of Stafford,

Worthampton, Warwick, and York, are everywhere strewed a few eet under ground with these remains. At Stroud, a railway ection laid open a tusk, measuring nine feet in length; and verywhere in the British Channel the fishery of the extinct quadruped is as ardently pursued, and often is as remunerative, s the fishery of the finny tribes themselves now existing on our hores.

These animals, once filling the plains of England with herds equaled only by those of the buffalo race which now darken the prairies of America, have fulfilled their destiny, and have pershed from the earth. "The difference," says Professor Owen, between the extinct and existing species of elephant in regard to the structure of the teeth, has been more or less manifested by every specimen of fossil elephant's tooth that I have hitherto seen from the British strata; and those now amount to upward of three thousand. Very few of them could be mistaken, by a comparative anatomist, for the tooth of an Asiatic elephant, and they are all obviously distinct from the peculiar molars of the African elephant." Cuvier ascertained like distinctions between the extinct and the existing Indian elephants; and concluded, from the reconstruction of the complete framework, that the mammoth type is no longer in being.

The proof that the elephant race actually inhabited this country is as satisfactory, and as well established, as that the species were different from any now existing. Little, indeed, can it be wondered at, upon the first discovery of their remains, that the accounts given by geologists and others were received with the greatest distrust. Their appearance, in these high latitudes, was attributed to the inroad of armies rather than to any indigenous connection with the soil that covers them. Cæsar, it was remembered, brought many elephants with him into Gaul. According to Polinæus, one at least was transported across the channel into Britain hence an easy and ready explanation of the fossils, as Voltaire, in his time, fancied the shells found on mountain tops to be the stray specimens dropped by pious pilgrims or superstitious monks on their journeyings. But as their numbers increased— some from Ireland where the soldiers of Rome never set foot, along with the bones of the rhinoceros and hippopotamus which

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