TIIK ri.lncKNK SK1IIKS 607 



resembling that of I'iki-nui, but without Hellad-otln rimn or tin- 

 antelopes. 



E. HISTORY OP THE PLIOCKM: I'KIUOD 



At the beginning of Pliocene time all the mountain ranges of 

 Central and Western Europe had been formed, and the greater part 

 of the European region was in the condition of dry land, though 

 the coast -lines were not the same as those of the existing con- 

 tinent. The British area was still a compact and extensive tract 

 of land, extending northward beyond Ireland and Scotland, but it 

 seems to have been separated from France and Belgium and must 

 therefore have been a large island. We have seen that the 

 southern aspect of the fauna of the Diestiau and Coralline Crag 

 Seas makes it almost certain that there must have been a connec- 

 tion with more southern seas, and this connection most probably lay 

 along the line of the English Channel and through Normandy to 

 the country between the Vilaine and the Loire, where it opened 

 into the Atlantic. This matter is more fully discussed in my 

 Building of the British Isles (1911). 



In the south of Europe the Mediterranean Sea still existed, but 

 probably opened southward through Egypt, for there is no evidence 

 of any opening across Spain or by the Straits of Gibraltar until 

 the time of the Sicilian Beds, when northern species of Mollusca 

 first entered the Mediterranean area. This Mediterranean only 

 covered small parts of Southern France, but seems in Placentian 

 time to have extended up the valley of the Rhone, converting it 

 into a sort of fiord. Thence its northern shore passed along the 

 feet of the Maritime Alps and round the great basin of Northern 

 Italy, the whole of that country except the ridge of the Apennines 

 being covered by the Lower Pliocene Sea, together with nearly the 

 whole of Sicily and parts of Northern Africa, especially in Tunis, 

 Tripoli, and Egypt. 



East of this sea, and separated from it by the ridge of the 

 Dinaric Alps and the Highlands of Montenegro and Albania, lay 

 the large inland sea of the Ponto-Caspian region, which extended 

 from the Vienna basin on the west to and beyond the Sea of Aral 

 on the east. Whether the deposits of Pontian age in Greece and 

 the ^Egean area were formed in a gulf of this sea or in separate 

 lake-basins is at present uncertain, but the probabilities are in 

 favour of the latter view. These conditions continued to prevail 

 in the Pontian area through Placentian time, but the waters of the 

 great lake gradually became more and more fresh, so that the 

 Congerias died out and their place was taken by Unio, Viviparus, 

 and Melanopsis. 



