PALEOLITHIC RACES 513 



or Cornwall ; and the deepest parts of the Irish Sea formed 

 great fresh-water lakes stocked with ancestral salmon. 



In the south we might look in vain for the Adriatic, and in 

 place of the Mediterranean we should discover two restricted 

 inland seas, separated -by a broad isthmus, which extended 

 from Northern Africa, through Sicily, into Southern Europe. 



On the extreme east, Asia was probably united with America,, 

 across Bering Strait, by a tract of land which extended an 

 unknown distance to the south, perhaps completing the arc of 

 the Aleutian Islands, now represented on the map by a mere 

 dotted line. 



On the extreme west and north an ancient bridge, afterwards 

 to break up into Iceland and the Faeroes, was possibly still 

 standing, and united Europe with Greenland and the east of 

 North America ; but this is an open question, to which we 

 shall refer later. 



In some places, on the other hand, the sea penetrated farther 

 into the land, as where the Arctic Ocean covered all the region 

 of the gulf of the Obi. 



A traveller starting in this ancient world from the banks- 

 of the Thames could have made his way over the watershed, 

 formed by the Straits of Dover into France, and so through 

 Italy and across Sicily into Africa, which would have then lain 

 open to him from end to end. If instead of entering Africa 

 he had turned to the left, he could have reached India by 

 devious paths, the Malay peninsula, and the East Indies, which, 

 unite here and there by land-connections, would have taken 

 him, with the help of a frail canoe, into Australia, whence he 

 might have wandered into Tasmania. 



If he wished to visit North America he would have had, 

 perhaps, a choice of routes, either by the Icelandic bridge or 

 the Alaskan isthmus. 



Even before leaving England he would see strange sights by 

 the way : great herds of elephants of an ancient kind (Elephas 

 antiqiius), the mightier predecessors, perhaps ancestors, of the 

 mighty African elephant ; he might witness, not without awe, 

 the infuriated rush of the soft-nosed rhinoceros {Rhinoceros 

 leptorhinus or Merckii), which bore a horn sometimes as much as, 

 three feet in length ; disporting itself in the rivers was that 

 shy behemoth the hippopotamus, the mother animal swimming 

 with her young upon her back ^sometimes he might catch sight 



