A Day's Eleyliant Hunting in Essex. 45 



from milder temperature back to Lapland rigours, might 

 occur. The higher vegetable forms might be arrested, 

 checked, and in places destroyed, and the adventurous 

 vanguard of the incoming animals starved or driven back, 

 but the land was now open to the great Europasian invasion. 

 The pine, the fir, and the birch, and turf-forming grasses, 

 self-sown and self-advancing, could now invade the land, 

 ousting the weaker herbaceous forms and preparing the 

 country for the ''age of elephants" which was soon to set in. 

 In the rigours of winter the musk-ox foraged the land, and 

 the Arctic rodents — the lemmings, the voles, and the hares 

 — were preyed upon by the fox and the glutton, and when 

 berries and roots had failed by the brown bear. The 

 summers began to lengthen, and the spreading pines and 

 firs were at length discovered by the first company of 

 migrant mammoths. The hardy but less gregarious woolly 

 rhinoceros, with its curious nasal horns, was seen in the 

 land. The wide-spreading 7]ioraine of south-eastern and 

 central England still stretched to the glacier foot on the 

 mountain districts of the Pennine, but in Essex and Middle- 

 sex it was now overgrown with forest and prairie, and 

 watered in summer with streams. Across the marshes and 

 through the forests of the former German Ocean, and 

 southward from the future Gaul, the invasion of the great 

 herbivores began. The animals of a more temperate zone 

 succeeded in south-eastern England as the musk sheep 

 retreated northwards. Herds of gigantic bison, uri, and deer, 

 and hosts of rodents came to the newly found feeding-ground. 

 Yet in spite of wolves and lions, the great vegetable feeding 

 mammalia lived and multiplied in the new and congenial 

 home. The mammoth became one of the commonest 

 animals of the Thames Valley ; the shed milk teeth of 

 the calf, and the last overworn molar of the patriarch of 

 the herd, are amongst the most abundant fossil remains 

 at Ilford, Grays, Erith, and Crayford. It was the age 

 of the great herbivores, for it was also the age of the 

 yet unrestrained carnivores." At least two species of wild 



* See an interesting lecture by Professor Rolleston on " The Changes 

 roduced by Man in the Indigenous Flora and Fauna of Great 



