34 



circumstances of which there are so many instances in nature> 

 a power of conformity with which the Creator has endowed the 

 various forms of life, acting through thousands of successive 

 generations, and so modifying species in harmony with the 

 changed conditions of climate and food. 



The mammoth in this country seems to been both pre-and- 

 post-glacial. It probably retired southward before the increas- 

 ing cold and then returned after the climate became modified. 

 The great number of tusks that strew the sea bottom, among 

 many other facts, points to the high probability that Britain was 

 then part of the continent ; and that the Thames, Medway, and 

 the Rhine Avere with other rivers, such as the Stour, but 

 tributaries of a much larger one that flowed into the North Sea. 

 Geologicall)', the strata on both sides of the channel are similar, 

 and the naturalist finds a greater number of species of animals 

 and plants on the continent than in England, and a greater num- 

 ber in the latter than in Ireland, two facts showing the British 

 Isles, formed at one time part of Europe, and that the separation 

 took place between Ireland and England before this country be- 

 came separated from the continent. From our poetical ideas of 

 the fathomless ocean, we are apt to over-rate the depth of the 

 sea. Mr. James Croll, in " Climate and Time," states that if we 

 reduce the size of the ocean to a pond one hundred yards wide, 

 the average depth of the water would only be represented 

 by an inch. The greatest depth between Dover and Calais is 

 not 200 feet, so the top of the rood tower of Canterbury 

 Cathedral, would stand 35 feet above the surface if placed in 

 mid channel. Also it does not seem possible that so large a 

 species originated in an island, although after it became separated 

 by the sea, these animals may have existed for many centuries in 

 the woods of our own district, which then most probably con- 

 sisted of birch and larch ; the climate in the Pleistocene period, 

 being much colder than at presnet, and unsuitable for the growth 

 of our glorious forest trees — the oak, the elm, and the beech. 

 The fossil remains of East Kent, show us that remarkable 

 changes of animal and vegetable forms were accompanied by 

 equally remarkable changes of climate, for the latter could not 

 have well taken place without affecting the former ; the 

 living forms either slowly adapting themselves to changed 

 conditions, or dying out. On the stage of our own im- 

 agination, we can lift the curtain of the past and see 

 in the London clay period, of the Lower Eocene, the palm 

 trees, the crocodiles, and small pachydermata of a warm (per- 

 haps tropical) climate, and the great and mysterious blank of the 

 Miocene, which here, like a corrupt borough, is unrepresented ; 

 — a period, too, of a warm and genial climate, when the animal 

 forms exceeded in size, and, still more remarkable, in the number 

 of their species, the animals of the present day. Through the 



