7 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ciation of living and extinct forms as we Lave observed in Europe. 

 Reindeer, musk-sheep, bisons, horses, elks, and bears were to be seen 

 along with the mammoth, the great elephant-like mastodon, and the 

 gigantic extinct sloth of South America. A lower jaw found in the 

 same place, which I have examined in Philadelphia, leaves no doubt 

 in my mind that the lion was among the carnivores of the United 

 States, which lived on the above-mentioned animals. It is not more 

 strange that the lion of the Old World should be found in the New, 

 than that the musk-sheep, now only alive in the Arctic regions of 

 North America and Greenland, should have ranged through Siberia 

 into Europe as far to the southwest as the Pyrenees. Asia was then 

 united to Northeastern America, and the Straits of Behring were then 

 an elevated tract of land offering free passage to migrating animals. 



Thus far in our inquiry into the British lion, we have been led to 

 consider a condition of things in Britain quite different from that of 

 the present day, and in tracing the animal to the Continent, and 

 finally to the United States, we have seen that tracts of land, now 

 sunk beneath the sea, connected our islands with the Continent, and 

 joined North Asia to North America. It must also be remarked that 

 the lion appears in the Old and New Worlds at the same hour, if I 

 may use the metaphor, of the geological clock, when " the old order " 

 was yielding " place unto the new," and the living species were be- 

 coming more abundant than the extinct among the higher mammalia 

 in other words, in the Pleistocene age. 



We have now to direct our attention to the retreat of the lion from 

 Europe. At the close of the Pleistocene age the great extension of 

 Europe to the west sank beneath the Atlantic, and the North Sea and 

 the English Channel flowed over the hunting-grounds of the lion, and 

 formed " the silver streak " of which we have so much reason to be 

 proud. A change in the wild animals accompanied, as it always does, 

 the change in geography ; some animals became extinct, such as the 

 mammoth, while others retreated to more congenial districts, and 

 amon? them the lion. Not a trace of that animal has been discovered 

 in the peat-mosses and other superficial accumulations in Britain, 

 France, Germany, or Italy, which took place in the prehistoric age, 

 or the interval between the Pleistocene on the one hand and the 

 frontier of history on the other. It was probably at this time retiring 

 southward into the districts in which it lived in the time of the early 

 Greek writers. 



The first discovery on record of the fossil lion was made in Hun- 

 gary. Strange to say, the earliest notice of the living lion relates to 

 the adjacent region divided from the valley of the Danube by the 

 Balkan Mountains. Herodotus (vii, c. 124-'6), in describing the march 

 of Xerxes through Roumelia, before the battle of Thermopylae, writes : 



"While Xerxes was on the march in this direction lions fell upon the hag- 

 gage-camels. They came down by night and left their usual haunts, and touched 



