68 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



series of disconnected local changes. There are many 

 good reasons for supposing that England was still 

 united to the mainland of Europe after the ice of the 

 last glacial period had all melted away : because our 

 fauna and flora are hardly at all peculiar, as is the case 

 with islands long separated from the neighbouring con- 

 tinents. The animals and plants of Britain are the 

 animals and plants of Europe generally since the glacial 

 epoch ; and they do not include any of those which are 

 peculiar to the pre-glacial age. They are so numerous 

 in species, and so fairly represent the fauna and flora of 

 the Continent, that they must have entered Britain from 

 the mainland by a broad ridge or isthmus at a period sub- 

 sequent to the great ice age ; and there is every reason 

 to believe that the earliest race of men now inhabiting 

 the island also entered it at the same period. 



Had not such a bridge existed later than the time 

 when the old fauna was killed off by the ice just as tho- 

 roughly as the temperate fauna of Greenland is killed 

 off in our own time, it would be impossible to account 

 for the presence of so many Continental animals, large 

 and small, as we actually find in Britain. A few deer 

 and a few rats might have swum over : but that all our 

 shrews, foxes, badgers, hedgehogs, hares, rabbits, moles, 

 squirrels, weasels, stoats, martens, field-mice, lizards, 

 snakes, and other mammals or reptiles, could have come 

 across by mere accident is incredible. Still less can we 

 believe that our 1 20 species of snails and our numerous 

 insects were introduced in such a fortuitous way. The 

 straits which divide the Australian from the Javan and 

 Indian fauna are scarcely wider than the strait which 

 separates England from the Continent : yet not one 



