36 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



was contemporary with the species of animals, many 

 of them large and formidable, which at that time 

 occupied the land. He must have entered on the 

 possession of a world more ample and richer in re- 

 sources than that which remains to us. The early 

 post-glacial age was, like the preceding pliocene, a 

 time of continental elevation, in which the dry land 

 spread itself widely over the now submerged margins 

 of the sea basins. In Europe, the British Islands were 

 connected with the mainland, and Ireland was united 

 to England. The Rhine flowed northward to the 

 Orkneys, through a wide plain probably wooded and 

 swarming with great quadrupeds, now extinct or 

 strange to Europe. The Thames and the Humber 

 were tributaries of the Rhine. The land of France 

 and Spain extended out to the hundred-fathom line. 

 The shallower parts of the Mediterranean were dry 

 land, and that sea was divided into two parts by land 

 connecting Italy with Africa. Possibly portions of 

 the shallower areas of the Atlantic were so elevated 

 as to connect Europe and America more closely than 

 at present. 



Connected with this elevation of the continents 

 out of the sea was a great change of climate, whereby 

 the cold of the pleistocene age passed away and a 

 milder climate overspread the northern hemisphere, 

 while the newly-raised land and that vacated by snow 

 and ice became clothed with vegetation, and were 

 occupied by a rich quadrupedal fauna, including even 

 in the northern parts of Europe, Asia, and America, 



