156 MEETING OP NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN FAUNA. CHAP. ix. 



the first in high northern latitudes.* The Cyrena fluminalis 

 and the Unlo UttoraUs, to which last I shall presently allude, 

 were not among the number. 



I long ago suggested the hypothesis that in the basin of 

 the Thames there are indications of a meeting in the post- 

 l)liocene period of a northern and southern ftiuna. To the 

 northern group may have belonged the mammoth {Eleplias 

 jprimigenius) and the Rhinoceros tichorhinus, both of which 

 Pallas found in Siberia, preserved with their flesh in the ice. 

 With these are occasionally associated the reindeei*. In 1855 

 the skull of the musk-ox {Bubalus nioschatus) was also found 

 in the ochreous gravel of Maidenhead, by the Eev. C. Kingsley 

 and Mr. Lubbock; the identification of this fossil with the 

 living species being made by Professor Owen. A second fossil 

 skull of the same arctic aninuil was afterwards found by 

 Mr. Lubbock near Bromley, in the valley of a small tribu- 

 tary of the Thames; and two others were dug up at Bath 

 Easton from the gravel of the valley of the Avon. Professor 

 Owen has truly said that, "as this quadruped has a constitu- 

 tion fitting it at j)resent to inhabit the high northern regions 

 of America, we can hardly doubt that its former companions, 

 the warmly-clad mammoth and the two-horned vvoollj^ rhino- 

 ceros (jR. tichorhinus), were in like manner capable of sup- 

 porting life in a cold climate."f 



I have alluded at p. 144 to the recent discovery of this same 

 buifalo near Chauny, in the valley of the Oise, in France; and 

 in 1856 I found a skull of it preserved in the museum at 

 Berlin, which Professor Quenstedt, the curator, had correctly 

 named so long ago as 1836, when the fossil was dug out 

 of drift, in the hill called the Kreuzberg, in the southern 



* Quarterly Geological Journal, vol. but he merely meant extinct in Eng- 



viii. p. 190, 1852. > land. 



Mr. Brown calls them extinct species, "j" Geological Quarterly Journal, vol. 



•which may mislead some readers ; xii. p. 124. 



