730 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OE SCIENCE. 



sea appears to have stretched from the eastern Baltic across to the Persian Gulf, 

 including the areas of the Black and Caspian seas ; and another wide channel 

 seems to have run west of the Ural Mountains, connecting the Caspian area with 

 the Arctic Ocean, so that the warm waters of the Indian Ocean found a free 

 passage to the very shores of Finland and Scandinavia. According to Prof, 

 Archibald Geikie, these shallow seas disappeared early in PHocene times, leaving 

 the Aral, Caspian, and Black Seas in something like their present isolation. 

 While eastern Europe thus began to acquire its present contour, equally remark- 

 able changes occurred at the same time in the west. The Atlantic ridge between 

 Britain and Greenland was submerged, thus separating Europe from America,, 

 and the connections of Norway with Spitzbergen on the one hand and Scotland 

 on the other were also severed by the encroachments of the North Sea. But the 

 British Islands were still joined to each other and to the Gaulish mainland; the 

 whole of Britain jutting out from the continent as a great triangular peninsula, 

 with the Shetlands in its apex. The volcanoes of northwest Britain gradually 

 lost their fires during the Pliocene age. Icebergs appeared in the North Sea, 

 and the general climate of Europe, though still milder than to-day, was much 

 colder than it had been during the Eocene and Miocene epochs. The vegeta- 

 tion began to lose its subtropical aspect. Bamboos, evergreen oaks, and magno- 

 lias still mingled with maples, willows, and poplars in the latitude of Lyons, but 

 the cinnamon-trees and palms became restricted to Italy. Among mammalia, 

 the first species that has continued to live down to the present time, namely, the 

 African hippopotamus, appears in the upper Pliocene strata of Auvergne. The 

 earliest true elephant, though of a species now extinct, appears at about the same 

 time ; and contemporary with him were two species of mastodon, of enormous 

 size, a rhinoceros, a tapir, two or more bears, the giant sabre-toothed lion, an 

 ancestor of the panthers and lynxes, and two kinds of hygena. There were many 

 species of deer, with antlers, but for the most part unlike (modern deer. The ox 

 appears first in the upper Pliocene, but without horns. There were also wolves^ 

 and swine, and two kinds of ape. The hipparion still lived, but was becoming 

 scarce, and along with him existed a horse, less specialized in teeth and feet than 

 the modern horse. 



Now from the fact that of these Pliocene mammals every one has long since 

 become extinct except the hippopotamus, Mr. Dawkins again proceeds to argue 

 that it is not likely that man inhabited Europe at that period. The alleged in- 

 stances, three in number, of the occurrence of human remains in Pliocene strata 

 of France and Italy he pronounces unsatisfactory ; and he does not even mention 

 the brilliant investigations of the Geological Survey of Portugal, which have 

 brought to light flint implements, of undoubted human workmanship, in great 

 abundance in the Pliocene strata of that country, buried under 1200 feet of super- 

 incumbent rock. These discoveries, set forth by M. Ribeiro in 187 1, are cited 

 by Professor Whitney as furnishing conclusive evidence of the presence of man 

 in Portugal during the Pliocene period. In his admirable memoir on The Aurif- 

 erous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada, Professor Whitney has collected a great 



