A Day's Elephant Hunting in Essex. 51 



British mammalia. In our region of softer rocks, the river 

 valleys perform the preservative and historic functions of 

 the hyaena-dens and bone-caverns of northern and western 

 Britain. 



III. 

 THE CAPTUEES. 



Yours, yours are the culpable shoulders 

 That bore off our bones from the quarries, to raise 

 Amazement and fear when exposed to the gaze 



Of featherless biped beholders. 



— Horatio Smith (Daubeny's Fugitive Poems) . 



Our pursuit of the feral denizens of the Thames Valley 

 this summer Saturday afternoon has been so exciting, that 

 we now find we have unwittingly been led on from familiar 

 tracts of Essex scenery into a new and mysterious geo- 

 graphical region. In vain we seek to recognise the scene 

 before us as belonging to modern or historical England. 

 A new and hitherto unmapped arrangement of land and 

 water stretches far away, and the animal world that dwells 

 around is wonderfully diverse from that we have hitherto 

 seen. "We are still, it would seem, in the country of the 

 Thames Valley ; but the tame and placid stream which a 

 moment since was winding unseen in the valley below us, 

 full four miles away, suddenly arises before us as a wide 

 and impetuous river, that comes swelling up the shore till 

 its waters lap our feet. With torrential volume it brings 

 down from its inland course the terrestrial spoils of the 

 country it has devastated — the carcasses of mammoths, 

 gigantic deer, and British rhinoceroses, whose fellows are 

 tramping and browsing in these aboriginal woodlands 

 around us. Huge shaggy aurochs and great-horned uri, 

 far-off ancestors of the gigantic oxen that the Eomans 

 saw when they first invaded the wooded wilds of uncivilized 



Europe, are 



Crushmg the forest in their race, 



and sharing again with the woolly-clad elephant and rhi- 

 noceros these gloaming Essex wilds. 



