140 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
species, to have contributed towards the tamed stock; none of 
these, however, retain its well-marked cranial characteristics, 
which are conspicuously shown in the lengthened forehead. 
There are decidedly, however, as far as Ireland is concerned, 
very many variatious in the curvature of the horns of skulls 
dug out of peat, which would seem to point to a long course 
of domestication; at all events, whether the animal was or was 
not a wild denizen of the land, it was very generally reared and 
eaten in England and Ireland during the early colonization of the 
islands. 
Few facts in the natural history of the British Islands are more 
surprising than that elephants, rhinoceroses, and a species of 
hippopotamus once dwelt in our land, when its physical aspect 
was not materially different from what obtains at the present day. 
No doubt these and other extinct mammals were more plentiful 
when Great Britain formed part of the continent of Europe, and 
when the Thames and other rivers were broader, as testified by 
their deposits. Still there is evidence to show that they lingered 
on after Great Britain had become separated from the mainland, a 
few only surviving the prehistoric period. 
The Thames valley in olden times, as shown by the animal 
remains found in its deposits—7. e., remains of elephants, rhino- 
ceroses, and river-horses, deer, oxen, and so forth—must have 
presented a wilder aspect than even the banks of the upper Nile 
at the present day. 
Not many years ago, whilst some workmen were employed in 
deepening a cellar below a club in Charles Street, St. James’s, they 
discovered the grinding tooth of an Elephant, a portion of the 
back-bone of the Giant Ox, and the curved canine tooth of a 
Hippopotamus, all in the clay which underlies the gravel so well 
known to London geologists. 
THE GreAT Hiproporamus, which inhabited England before the 
glacial epoch, returned again at its close, along with other quadru- 
peds. It appears to have been not uncommon, secing that remains 
have been found in bone caves in Devonshire, South Wales, 
Somersetshire, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, 
Gloucestershire, Middlesex, and Yorkshire, and in the deposits of 
the rivers Thames, Ouse, Cam, and Avon. There is only one 
record, and that not well authenticated, of its occurrence in Ireland, 
