THE BRITISH LION. 73 



point for surveying the conditions of life in Southern Britain while 

 they were being accumulated. The visitor in Stoneham's Pit at that 

 place sees a -brick-pit several hundred yards in extent, composed of 

 sand, shingle, and mud-banks, containing land and fresh-water shells 

 and numerous fossil bones resting where they happen to have been 

 dropped by the current, and these strata he can follow until they abut 

 on the chalk forming the ancient side of the river. The land-shells 

 have evidently been swept down by the ancient Thames from its higher 

 reaches, and the fresh- water species have for the most part lived where 

 they are now found, in the old river-bottom. These last are now liv- 

 ing in our streams and lakes, with the three following exceptions. A 

 small bivalve ( Cyrena fluminalis), there very abundant, has long ago 

 forsaken the rivers of Europe. It still, however, lives in the Nile and 

 in the streams of Cashmere, and probably also in the rivers and fresh- 

 water lakes of Siberia, and is also used as food by the poorer people 

 inhabiting the banks of the rivers of the great plain of China. A 

 fresh-water mussel (the Uhio littoralis) still thrives in the rivers of 

 France, in the Seine and Loire ; and a tiny fresh-water snail (Paludina 

 marginata) abounds in the streams of Southern France. Thus in the 

 ancient Thames at this time fresh-water mollusca now living in Britain 

 were to be found side by side with species now to be sought in the 

 rivers of France or of Asia. The fossil remains of the mammalia scat- 

 tered through the brick-earths as they were dropped by the current 

 have been discovered in astonishing numbers, and most of them con- 

 sist of isolated fragments, such, for example, as a broken skull of the 

 musk-sheep. Huge tusks of elephants lie side by side with antlers of 

 stasis and skulls and bones of bisons and horses. Sometimes entire 

 limbs have been preserved with bones in place, and in one case the 

 entire skeletons of a family of marmots surprised in the attitude of 

 hibernation, with paws over their noses, young and old together, stand 

 out from a block of hardened loam. Such as these are the materials 

 for working into a picture the conditions of life in the valley of the 

 Thames while these fluviatile deposits were being formed. 



The distinct was then haunted by many extinct wild animals, and 

 by living species no longer found together in any part of the world. 

 Stags and roe-deer lived in the forest side by side with the gigantic 

 and extinct Irish elk, the woolly rhinoceros, and the straight-tusked 

 elephant. Three kinds of rhinoceros, one of them covered with wool 

 and hair, fed on the branches and the undergrowth ; wild-boars 

 plowed up the ground in search of food, and the glades afforded 

 pasture to innumerable horses, bisons, and large horned uri ; and, 

 when forest and glade were alike covered with a snowy mantle, a few 

 musk-sheep, now the most arctic of all the herbivores, were to be seen 

 on the banks of the Thames in Kent. Among; the smaller animals we 

 may note the pouched marmot and the water-rat. These animals were 

 kept in check by numerous beasts of prey ; the smaller of them by 



