PREFATORY 3 



fauna. This has become so reduced in numbers, so scarce and 

 little evident in many of the existing species, that we should 

 almost appoint an annual national day of humiliation for our 

 poverty in this respect, a poverty due to the past ravages of 

 ourselves and our ancestors, and almost unexampled in any other 

 part of the habitable world, except New Zealand or the Pacific 

 Archipelagoes. 



This book, indeed, had it only dealt with the few well- 

 known wild beasts still lingering in Great Britain and Ireland, 

 would not have been worth compiling. But the author has 

 endeavoured to deal as amply as possible with recently extinct 

 British mammals ; and to expatiate on the interesting problems 

 concerning the origin and migration routes of the recent mam- 

 malian fauna which has inhabited these islands since the close 

 of the Tertiary Epoch. As one drives through the dreary streets 

 of Outer London, or gazes on the devastation of the Isle of 

 Sheppey, the over-building at Bournemouth, the smug villas of 

 Torquay, the paper mills of the Mendip Hills, the factory 

 chimneys of Yorkshire, the desolated bogs of Ireland, and the 

 hideous prosperity of Lanarkshire and Lancashire, it is possible to 

 derive some consolation by recalling in imagination the African 

 elephants and the hairy mammoths, the gigantic wild cattle and 

 clumsy horses, the sabre-toothed " tigers," the lions larger than 

 those now existing, the enormous cave bears, spotted hyaenas, 

 gigantic Irish deer, beavers, wild boars, and wolves which 

 severally or together made those regions a scene of fascination and 

 wonder even to Palaeolithic and Neolithic man. Like the writers 

 and statesmen of modern Greece and Spain, the author's thoughts 

 as a student of Mammalia are mentally fixed upon the glorious 

 past, and his survey of the present is a whimpering apology. He 

 who would fain have described how the sabre-toothed " tiger " 

 severed the spinal column of the megaceros deer with its trenchant 

 tusks ; how man, naked and unashamed, and armed with weapons 

 which were poor as compared with those of the Congo Pygmy, 

 matched himself against the mammoth and caught the aurochs in 

 a pitfall : he, instead, must twitter on the ferocity of the weasel 



