248 The New Forest : its History and its Scenery. 



Merely, however, collecting fossils for collecting's sake is 

 useless. The aim of geology is to enable us to understand 

 how this world was made — how form followed form, how type 

 after t}-pe took life and then passed away, and the higher 

 organization ever succeeded the lower. The Middle-Eocene 

 ought to be to us particularly interesting, separating us, on the 

 one hand, from those monsters which had filled the previous 

 Age, and, on the other, presenting the first appearances of those 

 higher mammals which should serve the future wants of man. 

 The pterodactyle no longer darkened the air. The iguanodon 

 now slept in its grave of chalk. A new earth, covered with new 

 t}^es and new forms, had appeared. It is a strange sight which 

 the Hordle Clifi's unveil. Here, beneath a sun fiercer than 

 in our tropics, the crocodile basked in its reed beds. Here the 

 alligator crimsoned the stream, as he struck his jaws into his 

 victim ; whilst the slow tryon}^ paddled through the waves, and 

 laid its eggs on the sand, where its plates are now bedded. 



The very rushes, which grew on the river banks, lie cf.ked 

 together, with the teeth of the rats which harboured in them. 

 The pine-cones still, too, lie there, their surfaces scarcely more 

 abraded than when they dropped from the tree into the tepid 

 waters. Along the muddy river shore browsed the paloplothere, 

 whilst his mate crashed through the jungle of club-mosses. 

 Groves of palms stood inland, or fringed the banks, swarming 

 with land-snakes. Birds waded in the shallows. But no 

 human voice sounded : nothing was to be heard but the scream- 

 ing of the river-fowl, and the deep bellow of the tapir-shaped 

 palaeothere, and the wolf-like bark of the hyaenodon. 



This description is no mere fancy, but taken from the 

 remains actually discovered in the Hordle Cliffs. I have had no 

 need to borrow from the fossils of the Headon and Binstcad 



248 



