A Day's Ele2)hant Hunting in Essex. 



89 



Such is the catalogue of animals which have been 

 disinterred during a series of years from these ancient 

 graves at Ilford. What startling questions they raise ! 

 What was the climate and what were the surroundings of 

 this their native land — of these now strangely altered 

 landscapes of Essex and South Eastern England, where 

 the hills and vales are now vocal with domestic sheep and 

 oxen, and where only the badger, the beaver, and the otter 

 are left as the largest of the fercB naturm of these 

 bygone times ? 



Some of the species found fossil at Ilford still inhabit 

 these islands ; others, like the brown bear and the w^olf , 

 have lived here in historic times ; the fossil bison or auroch 

 of the Essex and Middlesex prairie is hardly distinguishable 

 from the American buffalo of to-day. But what of the 

 stranger forms which figure on the list ? What of the 

 northern fleece-clad elephant, the woolly rhinoceros, now 

 vanished from the earth ; what of the hippopotamus, the 

 southern elephant, and the lioii, which are shown to us 

 to-day only as the captive exotics of the menagerie ? How 

 shall we assign to animals of such opposite regions and 

 climes a common area of habitation ? Did these creatures 

 really roam wild in natal landscapes in this valley of the 

 Thames ? Did they live, move, and have their being amid 

 scenes as orderly as the cosmos of to-day, or shall we 

 assign them, as was done by their earlier discoverers, to a 

 world of confusion and chaos, to the shadowy and horrific 

 Kingdom of Diluvia and Catastrophe ? 



Our first task, then, is this : To find in the Essex of 

 to-day some traces of former climatal and geograjjhical 

 conditions under whicJi these animals could have lived. 



