308 THE FOSSIL MUSK OX. 



addition to the larder of an arctic exploring party, 

 when they are fortunate enough to obtain it. 



It is curious that no trace of the musk ox has been 

 found in Spitzbergen ; its range seems to be confined, 

 at present, to Arctic North America ; but in days gone 

 past, it was much more widely distributed, as is proved 

 by the discovery of their fossil remains in Siberia, 

 along with those of the Mammoth, and other extinct 

 quadrupeds; their remains have also been found in 

 the plains of Germany and France, and also among 

 the Pleistocene gravels and clays of England, * show- 

 ing that there was a time when the musk ox roamed 

 over Europe as the domestic ox does now. And here 

 again, the veil which enshrouds a period of vast anti- 

 quity is once more raised, and we are able to discern 

 far in the mists of bygone ages an era when an 

 arctic climate reigned in England for it is probable 

 that the musk ox browsed on an English landscape 

 during a glacial epoch, when the climate of England 

 probably resembled that of Labrador in the present 

 day: and though this great ice age is gone, there still 

 exist the marks of ice excoriation, to prove that it 

 existed and that its glaciers once ground the ravines 

 and summits of our Scotch and Irish hills; the musk 

 ox, however, though long extinct in Britain, still sur- 

 vives amid the eternal snows of the frozen north, 

 a living relic of that ancient world, proving that even 

 in those dreary solitudes Nature has preserved certain 

 forms of animal life whose economy is specially adapted 

 to the frigid zone, and has transmitted them through 

 long ages of geological time as a survival of the 

 past. 



* Encycl. Brit., Qth Edition, Vol. xvii, p. 108. 





