THE BRITISH LION. 75 



The next question which presents itself is the geography of North- 

 western Europe, while the above strange group of animals lived in 

 Southern Britain. It is obvious from the fact of the above animals 

 finding their way here that our island must then have formed part of 

 the Continent. The fiuviatile strata of Crayford have been met with 

 at a depth of forty feet below high-water mark near Erith, so that then 

 the whole lower portion of the Thames Valley was higher above the 

 sea than it is now. The land, however, must have stood at a consid- 

 erably higher level than that, since the soundings in the shallowest 

 part of the Channel reveal a depth of about two hundred feet, and there- 

 fore an elevation of land of more than two hundred feet is necessary 

 to allow of the migration of the lion and the other animals. The area 

 now covered by the "silver streak" was then composed of forest-clad 

 undulations, extending from the line of the chalk downs then reaching 

 from Dover to Sangatte, in the Pas de Calais, on the one hand, north- 

 ward into the fertile pastures now sunk beneath the North Sea, and on 

 the other, to the southwest along the whole length of the Channel. 

 Nor are we able to find evidence of the western sea-margin at this 

 time till the hundred-fathom line is reached, which sweeps far to the 

 west of Ireland, southward close into the shores of the Bay of Biscay, 

 and northward so as to include the Hebrides and the Orkneys, form- 

 ing a narrow fiord close to the present coast of Norway, that reaches 

 as far as Denmark. The view of De la Beche and Lyell, that all with- 

 in this boundary was dry land, only broken by the rivers and the lakes, 

 is most probably true. In this manner alone can we account for the 

 presence of some of the above animals, such as the spotted hyena, in 

 Ireland. 



But when, it will be asked, were these things so ? The answer is 

 found in the fact of the presence of the living species of higher mam- 

 malia along with certain extinct species such as the mammoth, which 

 points to one, and one only, stage in the evolution of animal life that 

 which is termed Pleistocene or Quaternary by the geologists, and fur- 

 ther, to the middle stage of it, when temperate animals abounded and 

 Arctic animals were rare in Southern Britain. The question is unan- 

 swerable if asked from the historical and not the geological point of 

 view, because, outside the records in which the intervals between events 

 are written down, we have merely a series of events which occun-ed 

 in a certain order, without reference to lapse of time. An attempt to 

 ascertain an historical date outside history is obviously idle, and is not 

 furthered by an appeal to the present rate of the retrocession of water- 

 falls, or by speculations as to ancient changes in climate having been 

 produced by changes in the relation of the earth to the sun. The 

 events with which we are dealing the conditions of life when the lion 

 first appeared in Britain are so far removed from the earliest records 

 that we can not form an idea of the interval separating them from our 

 own time. It must, however, have been very great to allow of the 



