406 Sir H. Roicorth — Recent Changes of Level. 



marine shells in the same bed. I can only explain this by supposing 

 that the English Channel in the Mammoth age was open at least 

 as far as the longitude of Selsea; and as these shells contained a 

 number of Lusitanian species, it means that the English Channel 

 was then open to the west and south-west, whence these shells must 

 have come. This is confirmed by the further fact that, so far as I 

 know, no Mammoth remains have ever been dredged in the Channel 

 west from this point, except close inshore in Torbay, etc. How 

 much further eastward than Selsea the open water extended I do 

 not know. A Mammoth tooth has been dredged on the oyster banks 

 off Calais, and another in the channel separating the Vorn sand- 

 bank from its neighbour. This last is the furthest west in the open 

 channel that I know of any such remains having been found under 

 the sea, and the two banks perhaps mark the western edge of the 

 land. When we approach iJie eastern entrance to the Channel we 

 begin to find ample evidence of the land-bridge we have been 

 talking about. Between Dunkirk and Cromer we can draw a line 

 which passes through an area where the whole sea-bottom was once 

 strewn with Mammoth bones and teeth. The majority of them have 

 been cleared away by the dredgers. Most of them have been broken 

 and destroyed ; but the Owles Collection in the British Museum is 

 a splendid trophy, " spolia opima," from this cemetery, as the fisher- 

 men call it. We can put our dredges upon the actual land-surface 

 which then existed and bring up in them the remains of the animals 

 which lived on it, fresh, unweathered, and sometimes even articulated, 

 as is the case with specimens I have by me, and many specimens 

 in the Owles Collection, and in the collections at Norwich, etc. 

 The sharp edges of the muscular attachments in all these bones 

 and teeth show they were never exposed to the weather nor rolled 

 by the sea, and that they must have remained where the animals 

 fell from the time they fell until now. That these bones are the 

 debi'is of carcases floated by the rivers I do not for a moment 

 believe. Eivers do not float carcases out to sea in this way, and if 

 they did, these carcases are quite out of the way of any possible 

 river-current of any known rivers. When occasionally animals are 

 drowned in rivers they are speedily pulled under by the carnivorous 

 fish, etc. The vast cemetery of Mammoths and other animals existing 

 between Norfolk and Dunkirk has all the appearance of a stretch 

 of land which suddenly sank, and was thus submerged, with all 

 its living inhabitants. 



What the northern boundary of this isthmus was we cannot 

 positively say. If it be permissible to borrow an argument from 

 ornithology, we may fix it at a line joining the mouth of the Ell)e 

 and Norfolk ; for it is here that the famous migrating line of birds 

 is placed, and the ornithologists tell us they can only explain it by 

 supposing that this was the former limit of land and sea. Here, 

 then, we have the rude outline of the bridge over which Mammoth 

 and Khinoceros, Bison and Irish Elk, with their contemporary 

 Palasolithio Man, travelled from the Continent to Britain. This same 

 isthmus would also separate the cold waters of the North Sea, whose 



