18981 NEW SCHEME OF GEOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT 269 



record was intact in these realms the evidence would show it, but 

 unfortunately the debris of the land fauna and flora at all periods, 

 save one, are broken and fragmentary and scattered. The one 

 exception is that of the fauna contemporary with the Mammoth, which 

 abounds in enormous quantities in all parts of the world. In 

 fact the contrast between this poverty in other beds and the abound- 

 ing richness in the Mammoth beds is one of my strongest arguments 

 in favour of the catastrophic destruction of the latter fauna, as com- 

 pared with the slow and gradual decay of its predecessors. This 

 slow and gradual decay, in which bones and shells, instead of being 

 rapidly covered up, as they were in the case of the Mammoth and 

 its companions, were exposed to rain and snow, and faded and 

 weathered away, have left us only shreds of the former life in 

 certain fortunate localities, and there is apparently a considerable 

 gap in our evidence, which compels us to separate the Theriozoic 

 beds into two series, — one of them known as the Forest Bed, occur- 

 ring in a very limited locality near Cromer in Norfolk, and repre- 

 sented also by some scanty remains in Dorsetshire ; the other 

 represented by the contents of the older caverns, the brick-earths of 

 the Thames valley, etc., and generally by the remains of the old land 

 surface immediately underlying the Drift. The former is marked 

 by certain mammals which do not occur in the latter, and which 

 had been probably driven away by increasing cold or otherwise, and 

 had at all events become extinct in this country ; and the latter 

 marked by certain animals which had apparently migrated hither 

 in consequence of the increasing cold. Fresh discoveries, however, 

 yearly add to the list of mammals once thought to specially mark 

 the later beds, and which are now found to have existed also in the 

 earlier ones ; and in view of possible discoveries in future I should 

 be disposed to simply discriminate the two sets of beds by the words 

 older and younger, — the former especially marked by the presence of 

 ELephas meridionalis, Rhinoceros etruscus, Ursus arvemensisl 

 Trogontherium cuvieri, and by a series of deer which in my view 

 have not been yet quite sufficiently studied, but which were 

 apparently limited to this horizon. The latter was perhaps best 

 marked by the introduction of certain northern beasts, such as the 

 Eeindeer, etc., and by certain Steppe animals like the Saiga antelope. 

 Turning to the Himcrozoic beds, those commencing with so- 

 called neolithic times and coming down to to-day, they have some- 

 times been classified as prehistoric and historic. I cannot attach 

 any meaning to these terms which is admissible in a scientific 

 classification. We have long ago got past the stage of looking upon 

 history as necessarily based upon written documents. A great 

 deal of all history is in fact archaeology, and it matters little in 

 reconstructing the story of a people whether we piece together our 



