7 6 



HARD WICKE 'S S CIE NCE - G O SSIP. 



Humber and other streams; dense forests, wild moor- 

 lands and heaths, great swamps and morasses, 

 diversified doubtless in places by green pastures, 

 stretched far away inland from this great valley, as 

 well as from others on the south and west of Eng- 

 land. In those early ages, no mild winters were 

 known, though probably the summers were far hotter 

 than any which we now experience. We may even 

 imagine, if we will, snow-covered mountains, with 

 their glaciers creeping down into the valleys, in which 

 the snow would lie thick as winter drew on, whilst 

 the rivers would be sealed up by ice. We may 

 picture to ourselves the animal life of that period. It 

 is winter ; from the northern hills and forests come 

 travelling southward, driven by the excess of cold, 

 animals now called Arctic ; and in the valleys and amid 



Fig. si. Flint Implement from Brandon ; 3 nat. size. 



the woods of middle and southern England might 

 have been seen the herds of rein-deer, the gigantic 

 shaggy-maned mammoths with their huge recurved 

 tusks, smooth-skinned but woolly rhinoceroses, great 

 bears, wolves, and foxes, crafty gluttons, troops of wild 

 boars and other animals. Spring and summer draw 

 on, and as these animals begin to move once again to 

 m ire northern pasture-grounds, we find with the 

 increasing warmth an influx of other visitors, strange, 

 indeed, to England now, — lions and tigers, and 

 leopards, hyaenas, hippopotami, elephants, and other 

 species of rhinoceroses; and thus, in the strange climate 

 ef those days, might have been witnessed a continual 

 swinging to and fro, and an intermingling for a time, 

 of Arctic and southern animals, who made this 

 c iuntry their home, and many of which were even 

 bo 1 here, and here lived and died. Do any ask, 

 ! lo you know all this? is not all this a mere idle 



die mi? Let us, then, record some of the evidence. 

 'J 1 :se animals have left us their remains to this day ; 

 -1 iiny a brick-field and gravel-pit, in the soil of 

 1 iinis caverns, their bones, nay, occasionally even 

 tl ir complete skeletons, have been found, and no 

 1 tee accumulation this, no stray bones are these, 

 v 1 ;hed in by some great flood or floods from distant 

 : jions. The evidence shows that many of these 

 1 les were deposited in the very spots near to which 

 t se animals died. Sealed up in the floor of many a 

 cave are these relics of the past, not water-worn and 



rubbed, but fresh and sharp as to all their angles, some- 

 times also bone lying close beside its bone, as though 

 quietly dropped and covered up where found, as 

 must, indeed, have been the case, almost immediately 

 after death. Our cave floors give us proof also that 

 many of these animals, the rein-deer, hyaenas, mam- 

 moths, and others, must have been born in this 

 country. In the same bed, lying side by side, we 

 have found the young and the old, the rein-deer and 

 its fawn, the hyaena and its cub, the young as well as 

 the old elephant or rhinoceros, and a very brief 

 examination of the contents of some of our caverns will 

 demonstrate these facts ; we may not only see the 

 jaws, for instance, of the old hyaena with the teeth 

 worn by hard work almost to the gums, but also 

 those of the young animal, in which the permanent 



Fig. 52. Flint Implement from Langey, Fr. ; f nat. size. 



teeth are only just sprouting and pushing their way 

 beneath the deciduous ones. Most of the teeth of the 

 mammoths found in caves are those of young animals, 

 and when we come to look closely at all the bones 

 and teeth, we are at once struck with the fresh-look- 

 ing conditions of the majority, and are convinced that 

 they can have had no long journey to perform between 

 the death and burial of their owners. Another thing 

 which we may observe in the case of bones found in 

 caves is that many of them are seen to be scored and 

 gnawed into their present shape by the teeth of some 

 animal, and analogy has led to the conclusion that 

 the great devourer of the bulk of the animals whose 

 remains are found in caves was the hyaena. This 

 savage beast in those early days, as now, was 

 in the habit of dragging its victims wholesale or 

 piecemeal into its den, where it devoured not the 

 flesh only, but also the bones, rejecting only the 

 very hardest portions ; and the teeth, then, left lying 

 about on the floor, would soon be covered up by the 

 mud brought in, partly by the frequenters of the 

 caves, partly by floods, and also by the slow deposits 

 from the moisture which found its way through cracks 

 and fissures. It seems a strange thing that such 

 animals as those spoken of should ever have been 

 found side by side in our country, — the northern rein- 

 deer and the southern hyaena, for instance. Some 

 geologists have not been able to realize that they 

 could thus have lived during the same season, and 



