GAUDRY AND EVOLUTION—GLANGEAUD. 42] 
1. Pikermi, the parent of ancient worlds and of the present world. 
Commissioned to visit the Orient, he traveled with his friend Da- 
mour in Greece, Syria, Cyprus, and Egypt. In passing through 
Athens he learned that Duvernoy and A. Wagner had found not far 
from that city, at the foot of Mount Pentelicus, in a place called 
Pikermi, traces of fossil vertebrate faunas. He made a brief visit 
to the deposit, and later obtained a commission from the Academy 
of Sciences to exhume the fauna which it contained. 
It is in this country, over which hovers the genius of the ancient 
Greeks, that Gaudry began to resuscitate an entirely new world which 
existed many ages before the appearance of man. “On this classic 
ground his researches, his spirit, his thought, have created once more 
and in another connection a classic locality, for the name of Albert 
Gaudry will be forever united with the fauna of Pikermi.” (Ad- 
dress of the president of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin.) 
The excavations at Pikermi, pursued for many years and with 
some danger (it was in the time of the Crimean war), in a country 
infested with brigands, yielded many thousands of specimens, repre- 
senting 370 individuals. The skeletons of many fossil animals could 
be entirely reconstructed. Gaudry established the fact that this rich 
fauna comprised 35 genera, of which 20 were entirely extinct, and 5 
species scarcely or not at all known previously. 
In no country had ever been found a group of gigantic animals 
comparable to those of Pikermi. If the territory which these crea- 
tures inhabited had been regarded in olden times as the home of the 
gods, and had witnessed the splendor of the greatest geniuses of 
antiquity, the assemblage of creatures buried in the soil in a remote 
geological epoch also demanded vast areas. 
“Tt is necessary to believe that the plains were not alone more ex- 
tensive, but also richer than in our day. The marble slopes of Mount 
Pentelicus, Hymettus, and Laureium support for the most part only 
lowly herbs, which furnish food for bees, and it is probable that in 
ancient times there were, beyond these arid mountains, valleys with a 
luxurient vegetation, where prairie grasses alternated with magnifi- 
cent forests, for the productiveness of the animal kingdom necessarily 
presupposes that of the vegetable kingdom.” (Gaudry.) The 
abundance of herbivorous animals demonstrates the correctness of 
this view in an indisputable manner. The landscape was, indeed, 
enlivened by two-horned rhinoceroses and enormous wild boars, by 
monkeys (Mesopithecus pentelict), carnivores of the civet family, 
martens, cats, and hyenas, which dwelt in the caves of Pentelicus, 
while on the plains ranged flocks or herds—the hipparions and 
antelopes of slender and graceful form, with straight, spiral, or lyrate 
horns. 
