278 FOOTPRINTS OF VANISHED EACES IN CORNWALL. 



in another world. The flora is the same as before, but the fauna 

 has completely altered. The great beasts are gone for ever, and 

 in their place there appears the meagre wild fauna which 

 characterised Europe at the dawn of the historic era. In early 

 Neolithic times, Cornwall extended much further sea-wards than 

 it does now. This is proved by the submarine forests which 

 exist all round our southern coasts, from Eame to the Land's 

 End, and on our northern shores from the Land's End to Hart- 

 land. These forests are known to be later than the end of the 

 Palaeolithic period, because we sometimes find them— as at 

 Porlock*^^ — growing on the head of rubble, and also because the 

 bones of the great Palaeolithic mammalia are not found in them. 

 They extend far out to sea, at least 100 feet below low water 

 mark. In Neolithic days they must have formed densely wooded 

 tracts through which our rivers sluggishly found their way to the 

 sea, between banks of reeds, hazels and willows. Inland, the 

 slopes of our hills were covered with dense forests, consisting of 

 oaks, elms, birch and hazel, whilst many of the valleys were wild 

 lonely morasses. Where the Tregoss Moors and Trewartha 

 Marsh now spread their green expanses, there stretched then 

 great deep lakes, fringed by thickets of reeds and overhung 

 by wooded hills. Beneath our granite tors as they rose in silent 

 grandeur there extended great open spaces above the woodlands, 

 carpeted with verdant grass. There flourished, in tangled pro- 

 fusion, fox-glove, brier and harebell. There grew wide rolling 

 seas of ferns, interspersed with patches of golden gorse and 

 purple heather. 



Comj)ared with the great number of wild beasts that inhabi- 

 ted Western Britain during the Palaeolithic period, the fauna of 

 Cornwall in the Neolithic age seems poor and meagre. The 

 great Irish elk — which was not a real elk, but a genuine deer — 

 was then king of our Cornish woodlands. The maned bison or 

 Aurochs, and the gigantic wild-bull or Urus, roamed through the 

 glades and the thickets. Strange also it is to learn that the rein- 

 deer was at that time an inhabitant both of Cornwall and Devon, 

 some of its skulls and antlers found in Cornwall being now in the 

 museum of the Poyal Institution of Cornwall at Truro.*^^ Herds 



6i. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, vol. xlviii, 1892, p. 286. 

 62. A pair of horns of the red deer found at Pentuan are also in the museum at 

 Truro. 



