478 Bihliographical Notice. 



lacustrine or freshwater formations of ' brick-earth,' both the geo- 

 graphical and climatal conditions of those parts of Europe have 

 changed. 



" The legend of the loss of Earl God-ndn's lands — the evidence of 

 the monuments of the old monks transferred to Chichester Cathedral 

 when the sea began to gain upon their Abbey, with the indication 

 given by ' Selsey Bill ' of the whereabouts of the submerged lands 

 of the Saxon Earl on which the Abbey stood (about halfway, now, 

 between Bracklesham and the east end of the Isle of Wight) — the 

 submerged forest exposed some twenty feet below the actual sea- 

 level in excavating the docks at Jarrow Slake, — these and many- 

 other examples of slow and gradual change, such as still aiTects 

 the Norfolk coast, operated to the remotest bounds of recorded time 

 and long antecedent to history or legend. They indicate part of 

 those changes in the disposition of sea and land which, being con- 

 comitant with analogous changes of the American coast affecting 

 currents and causing ' gulf-streams,' put an end to the glacial climate 

 which previously prevailed in our latitudes. 



'• The evidences of the human species as we descend in the 

 Quaternary series are mainly reduced to rude implements of stone ; 

 and all who have, without prepossession, intelligently studied these 

 evidences and the conditions of their discovery, whether in caves or 

 drifts, are at one in defining them as ' prehistoric' Beyond the 

 Quaternary series reliable evidences of Man are not known to the 

 writer. 



" During the Pliocene division of tertiary time, in which lived 

 many mammals the species of which have now passed away, we infer, 

 from the geographical correspondence of their distribution with that 

 of their existing allies, that the main features of the actual distri- 

 bution of land and sea, in regard to the larger continents, had been 

 attained. 



" In the Miocene and Eocene periods other geographical conditions 

 prevailed, with other climates. Correspondence in localized distri- 

 bution of recent and fossil species can no longer be predicated. But 

 significant evidences of the origin of existing species are found. 

 The miocene Hippariun, with the pair of hooflets dangling behind 

 the main hoof in each foot, has made intelligible to anatomy the 

 veterinarian's ' splint-bones ' concealed beneath the skin of the fore 

 and hind feet of the pliocene and modern Equines. The eocene 

 Palcfotherium shows the hooflets of the three-toed miocene horse in 

 more normal and functional proportions. A similar progressive spe- 

 cialization is traceable from an artiodactyle type of quadruped, as 

 represented, e.g., by the eocGne Anoplotherium, to th.e useful cloven- 

 hoofed ruminants of the human period. 



" The biological, geological, geographical, and climatological phe- 

 nomena of the tertiary divisions of time bafflle all endeavours to 

 conceive the number of annual revolutions of the globe during which 

 these changes and advances in organic life were in progress. 



To so test or define the periods of formation of the grander and 

 more numerous subdivisions of Secondary or Mesozoic series becomes 



