112 THE LAPSE OF TIME. 



Highland clan from the earliest times, showing how they 

 gradually made it fashionable to do without the various 

 articles of clothing which one by one they have been 

 induced to resume 1 ! During the same epoch, within 

 the same limits of time, migrating also from the warm 

 regions of Asia, came elephants and lions, hyenas and 

 bears, the rhinoceros and the elk. Little recked they 

 then of change of climate, which now they so ill endure. 

 They prowled all over Europe; they swam across the 

 English Channel. Yet before the historical period 

 begins in Gaul and Britain, most of these species had 

 had time not only to make their way thither, not only 

 to flourish and abound in these habitations, but to die 

 out and to be forgotten. We know for certain that 

 elephants once roamed over Devon. Did they succumb 

 to the flint weapons of the savage? Was the same 

 savage able to extirpate the hyena and the lion, 

 though the representatives of those fierce beasts still 

 partially set us at defiance in India, notwithstanding 



1 The resuming process has not yet been adopted by the modern 

 Fuegians, for Dr. Hooker informs us that at the extreme south of Tierra 

 del Fuego, and in mid- winter, he has often seen the men lying asleep 

 in their wigwams, without a scrap of clothing, and the women standing 

 naked, and some with children at their breasts, in the water up to their 

 middles gathering limpets and other shell fish, while the snow fell thickly 

 on them and on their equally naked babies.' Sir J. Lubbock, ' Pre- 

 historic Times,' p. 532. Jerome declares that he had himself seen the 

 Attacotti, a British tribe, eating human flesh. See Gibbon (vol. iii. 

 p. 270, ed. 1854), who in several passages refers to the practice 

 among various British tribes of going naked, especially in war, citing 

 Appian, Ammianus, and Giraldus Cambrensis as his authorities for 

 British customs. It will be remembered that Caesar speaks even of the 

 Southern Britons as fighting ' omnibus membris expediti.' 



