1846.] 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECFS JOURNAL. 



347 



some of the peculiar extinct genera of the Paris basin. In the fresh 

 waler and marine beds at tbe north side of the Isle of Wislit, and at the 

 opposite coast of Hampshire, the united tliiclcness of which beds is abont 

 400 feet, remains of the very same peculiar quadrupeds of the contempo- 

 raneous Parisian formations have been found. 



One of the rarest and most remarkable of the pachyderms, whose pe- 

 culiar characters were obscurely indicated by Cuvier from scanty fossils 

 yielded by tlie IVIoutmartre gypsum, has had ils claims to generic distinc- 

 tion established, and ils nature and afhnities fully illustrated, by more per 

 feet specimens from the eocene marls of the Isle of Wight : in no other 

 part of Great I'ritain has any portion of the cha;ropolamus been found, 

 except in the above limited locality, which alone corresponds with the 

 formations of the Paris basin in mineral character as well as in date and 

 origin. This discovery becomes, therefore, peculiarly interesting and sug- 

 gestive. For were the common notion true, that all the fossil remains of 

 quadrupeds not uow^ existing in our island had been brought hither during 

 a single catastrophe, and strewed with the detritus of a general deluge 

 over its surface, what would have been the chance of finding the lower jaw 

 of a chseropotamus in the very spot and in the very limited locality where 

 alone in all England the same kind of deposits existed as those in which 

 the unique upper jaw of a cha2ropotamu3 had been found in France? 

 With the chairopolamus are associated, in the Binstead and Seafield quar- 

 ries, remains of aooplotherium, dichobunes, paleeutherium, and lophiodon, 

 showing, with the fossils from the London clay, that the same peculiar 

 generic forms of the class mammalia prevailed during the eocene epoch in 

 England as in France. 



With the last layer of the eocene deposits, we lose in this island every 

 trace of the mammalia of that remote period. What length of time elapsed 

 before the foundations of England were again sufficiently settled to serve 

 as the theatre of life to another race of warm-blooded quadrupeds, the 

 imagination strives in vain to form an idea of, commensurate with the evi- 

 dence of the intervening operations which cootiuental geology teaches to 

 have gradually and successively taken place. Our own island yields us 

 but a dim and confused indication of the geological operations that took 

 place between the eocene and pliocene periods, in the wreck of strata that 

 constitute part of the so-called crag formations on its eastern coast. When 

 the eocene and other foundations of our present jsland begin to rise from 

 tlie de^p and become the seat of fresh-water lakes, receiving their tranquil 

 deposits, with the abundant shells of their testaceous colonies, and during 

 the long progress of that slow and unequal elevation which converted 

 chains of lakes into river courses, an extensive and varied mammalian 

 fauna ranged the banks or swam the waters of those ancient lakes and 

 rivers: of this we have abundant evidence in the bones and leeth of suc- 

 cessive generations which have been accumulated in the uudisturbed stra- 

 tified lacustrine and lluviatile formations. The like evidence is given by 

 the existence of similar remains in unstratilied coral drifts, composed of 

 gravel exclusively derived from rocks iu the immediate vicinity of such 

 drift, without a single intermixture of any far transported fragment ; 

 equally conclusive and mure readily appreciable proof that the now ex- 

 tinct pliocene and pleistocene mammalia actually lived and died in the 

 country where their remains occur, has beeu brought to light from the dark 

 recesses of the caves which served as lurking places for the predaceous 

 species, and as charnel houses to their prey. 



Gigantic Pliocene Animals. 



At the period indicated by these superficial stratified and unstratified 

 deposits the mastodon had probably disappeared from England, but gi- 

 gantic elephants of t«ice the bulk of the largest individuals that now 

 exist in Ceylon and Africa roamed here in herds, if we may judge from the 

 abundance of their remains. Two-horned rhinoceroses, of at least two 

 species, forced their way through the ancient forests or wallowed in the 

 swamps. Deer, as gigantic in proportion to existing species, were the 

 contemporaries of the old uri and bisontes, and may have disputed with 

 them the pasturage of that ancient land. The carnivora, organised to 

 enjoy a life of rapine at the expense of the vegetable-feeders, to restrain 

 their undue increase and abridge the pangs of the maimed and sickly, 

 were duly adjusted in members, size, and ferocity, to the fell task assigned 

 to them in the organic economy. Besides a British tiger, of larger size, 

 and with proportionally lager paws than that of Bengal, there existed a 

 stranger feline animal of equal size, which, from the great length and 

 sharpness of ils sabre-shaped canines, was probably the most ferocious 

 and destructive of its peculiarly carnivorous family. Of the smaller 

 felines, we recognise the remains of a leopard or large lynx, and of a wild 

 cat. Troops of savage hyenas, larger than the fierce crocula of South 

 Africa, which they most resembled, devoured what the nobler beasts of 

 prey had left. A species of bear, surpassing tlie ursus ferox of the Kocky 

 Mountains, found ils hiding place in many of the existing limeslone caverns 

 of England. With it was associated a somewhat smaller kind, more like 

 the common European bear, but larger than the present individuals of the 

 ursus arctos. Wolves and foxes, the badger, the otter, the foumart, and 

 the stoat, complete the category of the known pliocene carnivora of Bri- 

 tain. 



These a7iimals native in Great Britain. 



The first idea which commonly suggests itself on the discovery at some 

 depth in the soil of tbe fossil remains of a large quadruped, now strange 

 to our island, is, that the carcase of such animal had been drifted hither 

 from some distant region. Prof. Owen alluded, in refutation of this idea, 



to the evidence which Dr. Bucklaiid had brought forward of the long-con- 

 tinued habitation by hyenas of the Kirkdale cave in Yorkshire ; of the 

 remains of young mammoths, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses, that had 

 been dragged into the cave, and their devoured, or their bones knawed, by 

 the hyenas. Amongst other phenomena he particularly adduced the fol- 

 lowing : it is well known that the antlers of deer are shed and renewed 

 annually, and a male may be reckoned to leave about eight pairs of antlers 

 besides its bones to testify its former existence upon the earth; but as the 

 female has usually no antlers, we may expect to find four times as many 

 pairs of antlers as skeletons in the superficial deposits of the countries in 

 which such deer have lived and died. The proportion of the fossil antlers 

 of the great extinct species of Brilish pliocene deer, which antlers are 

 proved by the form of their base to have been shed by the living animals, 

 is somewhat greater than in the above calculation. Although, therefore, 

 the swollen carcase of a great exotic might be borue along a diluvial wave 

 to a considerable distance, and its bones ultimately deposited far from its 

 native soil, it is not likely that the solid shed antlers of such species of' 

 deer should be carried by the same cause to the same distance, or rolled 

 for any distance, with other heavy debris of a mighty torrent, without 

 fracture and signs of friction. But the shed antlers of the large extinct 

 species of deer found in this island and in Ireland have commonly their 

 points or branches entire, as when they fell ; and the fractured specimens 

 are generally found in caves, and show marks of the teeth of the hyenas, 

 by which they have been knawed ; thus at the same time revealing the 

 mode in which they have become introduced into those caves, and proving 

 the contemporaneous existence of both kinds of mammalia. The perfect 

 condition, and the sharply defined processes, often in high relief, of many of 

 the bones of the elephants, rhinoceroses, and liippopotamuses,from our tran- 

 quil fresh-water deposits, concur with the nature of their bed to refute the 

 hypothesis of their having been borne hither by a diluvial current from 

 regions of the earth where the same genera of quadrupeds are now limited. 

 The very abundance of their fossil remains in our island is incompatible 

 with the notion of their forming its share of one generation of tropical 

 beasts drowned and dispersed by a single catastrophe of waters. This 

 abundance indicates, on the contrary, that the deposits containing them 

 formed the grave-yard, as it were, of many successive generations. With 

 regard to the mode of introduction of this laiest and most extensive series 

 of quadrupeds, it could hardly be supposed that the ponderous rhinocero- 

 ses, the hyenas, wolves, foxes, badgers, oxen, horses, hogs, and goats, the 

 smaller deer, hares, rabbits, pikas, or even the aquatic rodents, could have 

 reached this island from the continent, if the present oceanic barrier had 

 interposed. The idea of a separate creation of the same series of mam- 

 malia which existed on the continent iu and for a small contiguous island 

 will hardly be accepted. The zoologist Desmarest deduced an argument 

 in proof that France and England were once united, from the correspond, 

 ence of their vpolves, bears, and other species known to have existed in 

 this island within the period of history. Prof. Owen deemed the conclu- 

 sion irresistible when the same correspondence was found to extend throuo-li 

 the entire series of proboscidian, pachydermal, equine, bovine, cervine, 

 carnivorous, and rodent mammalia, which characterised the two countries 

 during the pliocene and post-pliocene periods of geology. Thus, observed 

 the lecturer, the science of anatomy having revealed the great fact of the 

 former existence in our present island of the same species of quadrupeds, 

 most of which are now extinct, that co-existed on the continent, has become 

 in an unexpected degree auxiliary to geographical science, and throws 

 light upon the former physical configuration of Europe, and on the changes 

 which it has since undergone. 



Geographic Viiinn of England and France. 

 Prof. Owen then briefly touched upon the purely geological evidence of 

 the former union of England with the continent, and to the comparatively 

 modern period of some remarkable changes which have taken place on our 

 southern coast, and to which may be attributed the final establishment of 

 the British Channel. But in referring to that event as comparatively 

 recent, the term, he said, must not be judged of in relatfon to any such 

 insignificant fraction of the world's time as has been marked down in the 

 records of the present infancy of the human race : we shall better appre- 

 ciate it, perhaps, by recalling the ideas of perpetuity which we attach to 

 our ocean barrier, when, gazing on its waves, we sum up the known 

 changes which they have produced on the coast line within the period of 

 history or tradition. The indications of such changes, mighty in compari- 

 son with any of which human history takes cognisance, prepare us to view 

 with less surprise the corresponding changes which have taken place in the 

 mammalian fauna ; but we are still ignorant of the cause of the extirpa- 

 tion of so large a proportion of it as has become extinct. It is an import- 

 ant fact, however, that a part, and not the whole, has thus perished, and 

 that the cause has not been a violent and universal catastrophe, from which 

 none could escape but by miraculous intervention. There is no small 

 analogy, indeed, between the course of the extirpation of the pliocene 

 mammals and that w hich history shews to have aliected the wild animals 

 of continents and islands in connexion with the progress of man's domin- 

 ion. The largest, most ferocious, and the least useful of the pliocene 

 species have perished ; but the horse, the hog, probably the smaller species 

 of wild ox, the goat, and many of the diminutive quadrupeds, remain. 

 There is not, however, any satisfactory evidence that the human species 

 existed when the mammoth, the tichorine and leptorhine rhinoceros, and 

 the great northern hippopotamus, became extinct. It is probable that the 

 horse and ass are descendants of species of pliocene antiquity in Europe : 



