156 S. V. Wood, Jim. — The Post-Glacial Period. 



feeble weajDons of bone and flint the gigantic pacliydermata and 

 felines of the Post-glacial period ? Fancy attacking a rhinoceros, 

 whose hide will turn a rifle bullet, with a flint hatchet or a bone 

 skewer! Contrivances of various kinds have probably been 

 employed by the Asiatics and by Africans, from time immemorial, 

 for ensnaring these animals; but no appreciable effect in diminishing 

 their numbers seems to have resulted. Von Wrangel describes the 

 soil of Siberia as having teemed with the bones and tusks of the 

 elejDhant, before it had been so much ransacked by the ivory hunters ; 

 and he mentions that in some islands of the Arctic Sea, which lie off 

 the Siberian coast, forest beds occur full of elephantine remains 

 which are now beyond the limit of arboreal vegetation, and where 

 now a moss-covered soil only exists, forming a favourite haunt of the 

 reindeer. No one who reads his account of the few wandering tribes 

 that now inhabit the Siberian wastes, and which seem to be in a con- 

 dition scarcely superior to that of the Post-glacial bone and flint 

 implement races, can suppose that they exterminated the great herds 

 of elephants that once roamed over Northern Asia, for they cause no 

 diminution in the numbers of the easily-vanquished herds of reindeer, 

 which they attack and slaughter while crossing the rivers, since 

 these return again in equal numbers another year. 



Mr. Dawkins has pointed out that the remains of the reindeer 

 occur in certain Post-glacial deposits only, and more particularly in 

 those of the caves, and that with them are associated the remains of 

 the more recent species of extinct pachydermata ; and reasoning from 

 the habits of their living analogues, we may without qualification 

 assert that conditions which would be essential for the subsistence of 

 the pachydermata would be unfavourable for the reindeer, and vice 

 versa. The reindeer subsists principally on a moss, which grows 

 rapidly over the frozen soil of the regions skirting the Arctic Sea, 

 upon which arboreal vegetation will not exist, retiring from these 

 mossy wastes to the woody regions for a season only ; and no large 

 herbivorous animal, except the musk ox, is able to sustain life in the 

 regions that are peculiarly the haunts of the reindeer. The rhino- 

 ceros and elephant, on the other hand, require an arboreal vegetation 

 for their support, and are never away from it; and however the 

 hippopotamus may have struggled against them during its decline, 

 we can scarcely suppose that it could ever have been tempted to 

 migrate into a region of frozen rivers, or to abandon the abundant 

 feeding ground afforded by the banks and swamps of warm 

 southern rivers for the frozen and baiTen wildernesses frequented 

 by the reindeer. 



The question then arises, how do we come to find the remains of 

 such incongruous animals in association in Post-glacial deposits ? 

 The answer appears to me to be, that when the pachydermata spread 

 themselves over Northern Europe, after the Glacial period, the 

 climate was mild and equable ; and that it was owing to a subsequent 

 and late Post-glacial refrigeration that the reindeer coming from the 

 North overran the country thus already occupied by the great mam- 

 malia; and that these latter, as the cold gradually progressed, adapted 



