146 EELIQUI.E AQUITANICLE. 



A.TLC. 480, when the Tiber was frozen and the ground covered with snow for a 

 period of forty days. Throughout, hy ancient writers, the climate of Gaul is 

 described as extremely inclement sometimes, indeed, in terms obviously exag- 

 gerated. The limited resources of my private shelves, however, to which alone I 

 can make reference, do not permit me to pursue this subject further. It has, I 

 believe, been amply treated by Hume in his ' Essay on the Populousness of 

 Ancient Europe,' and by other authorities. Withal, making every allowance for 

 probable exaggeration, the weight of evidence is in favour of the conclusion that 

 the winter climate of Europe has become much less severe. Whether this 

 change be due, as is asserted to be the case in Upper Canada, to the clearing and 

 subsequent draining of large tracts of land in the progress of agriculture, or 

 whether, with the lapse of time, to more recondite causes, is a question I do not 

 profess to decide ; but naturally, in a choice of difficulties, one is disposed to 

 accept the more obvious explication. 



While advocating, then, a solution of the interesting question before us recon- 

 cilable with modern analogies, and consistent with the partial enlightenment 

 afforded by anciently recorded facts, I shall, I trust, be pardoned if I venture to 

 submit that the existence of the Reindeer, and that of some of the other fossil 

 animals, such as the Hippopotamus incidentally mentioned, must be referred to 

 widely different epochs [see M. Lartet's Note B, further on] that they could not, 

 in the recognized order of Nature, have been coexistent. The presence of the one 

 it is easy to realize as of comparatively modern date, without presupposing any 

 material change in the world's condition : easy, again, for the imagination, travel- 

 ling backwards, to repeople the now smiling fields of Gaul with a nomadic race, 

 primitive in habits, and deriving a precarious subsistence from the spoils of the 

 chase, of which the relics, with other rude vestiges of human occupancy, are 

 displayed before us. It is to my conception as a thing of yesterday in the great 

 Kalendar of ages remote, indeed, but realizable to the mind without inferring 

 those vast climatic changes inseparable from the consideration, with reference 

 to geographical distribution, of the Fauna of the remote geologic periods. 



