FAUNA OF YORKSHIRE. 187 



forests, and lacustrine marls, certainly of postglacial date, we 

 find in Yorkshire a great and prevalent difference : the Ele- 

 phant, Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, Lion, Tiger, and Hyaena, are 

 absent. We find the great Irish Elk, the Red Deer, the Fallow 

 Deer, the Bos longifrons, the common Ox, the Goat, Sheep, 

 Horse, and Boar. 



By the absence of the great pachydermata and carnivora this 

 fauna differs from that of the preglacial period, but by no cha- 

 racters is it clearly separable from the series of mammalia now 

 inhabiting this country. The Irish Elk and Bos longifrons may 

 perhaps be appealed to for this purporse, for both are now ex- 

 tinct, but the latter at least survived to accompany some of the 

 old British tribes, and its skull has been found with that of the 

 Red Deer, from which the antlers had been cut off. There is 

 nothing in the vegetable remains which occur in the peat and 

 lacustrine marls different from what now grows in this region, 

 and we are not warranted in refusing to connect the later part 

 of this postglacial fauna with the earliest known human inhabit- 

 ants of the British Isles. 



So that we have now passed the sera of what have been called 

 earlier creations 



ecfcetaque tellus 



Vix animalia parva creat, quae cuncta creavit 

 Saecla. Lucretius. 



In fact, the great buried forests of Hatfield Chace and Thorne 

 Waste furnish positive proof that their sera, which is apparently 

 that of the later postglacial period, was within the historical 

 ages of Britain. In them Mr. De la Pryme* found " vast mul- 

 titudes of the roots and trunks of trees of all sizes, great and 

 small, and of most of the sorts that this island either formerly 

 did, or that at present it does produce; as firs, oaks, birch, 

 beech, yew, thorn, willow, ash, &c. . . . Many of the trees have 

 been burnt sometimes quite through ; others chopped, squared, 



* Philosophical Transactions, 1701. 



