Falconer and his Labours in India 333 



fined to Africa. There were also camels of more gigantic stature 

 than any still living. Giraffes, horses, and hipparions, small animals 

 closely allied to the horse, but possessed of three hoofs on each 

 foot, three species of rhinoceros, two of which are closely allied 

 to the species now living in India and Sumatra, and a remarkable 

 herbivore, the Chalicotherium, lived on the foliage. Tliere were 

 also many kinds of extinct oxen, and two of antelope to feed on the 

 grass; and the strangest of all known mammals, the great Sivathe- 

 rium, that fed probably on a mixed diet of grass and foliage. Stranger 

 than a dream, or one of Albert Durer's demons, was its form. Pos- 

 sessed of four horns, like the Antelope quadricornis of Hindostan, 

 it had the trunk of a tapir, the stature of an elephant, and the 

 teeth of an ox. Two kinds of wild boar, one of gigantic size, fed 

 on the wild fruits and tubers that grew in the forests, and a hippo- 

 potamus of an extinct species dwelt in the rivers. These herbivores 

 were also kept in check by a corresponding development of the 

 carnivora. There was the great sabre-toothed lion, the tiger, a 

 bear, an animal allied to the ratel, an otter, fox, and hyaena. 

 Four species of monkey lived in the trees, one closely resembling the 

 orang-outang, and another indistinguishable from the small Hoonu- 

 man. The reptiles, also, were not unrepresented. There was the com- 

 mon Crocodilus bombifrons of the Ganges, and the common gavial, 

 as well as two extinct species — a small tortoise still living in the 

 neighbourhood, and a most gigantic member of the same genus, 

 twenty-two feet long and six feet high, the Colossochelys Atlas. Such 

 is the fauna of ancient India revealed by the genius of Dr Falconer. 

 At what time in the history of the earth did it live ? Dr Falconer 

 himself oscillated between a belief, derived apparently from the 

 mineral character of the rock, that it belonged to the miocene age,-'' 

 and an inference drawn from the study of the fossil mammalia, 

 that it lived through a vast and unbroken period of time, equivalent 

 to that which elapsed between the miocenes and pleistocenes, or 

 recent deposits of Europe. 



"The evidence," he writes, "from the vertebrate animals is of a double 

 character ; half of them are so like the fauna we have in India that they might 

 pass for the creatures of yesterday, while the other half represents the characters 

 of the middle and older tertiaries of Europe. That they belong to the vertebrate 

 series which immediately preceded the existing race of animals is hardly sus- 

 ceptible of doubt, from the admixture of existing reptiles." — (P. 27.) 



In Europe, and especially in the south, some of the forms of life 



* Vol. i., p. 21 ; ii., pp. 557, 639, 642. 



