xli 



IV 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



subsequently transferred to Mr. Owen for description ; but, 

 in 1857, Dr. Falconer published an account of one of these 

 remarkable Purbeck genera, Plagiaulax, and this was fol- 

 lowed, in 1862, by a second paper on the disjDuted affinities 

 of the genus.' 



Having occuj)ied himself during several years with the 

 special investigation of the Mammalian fauna of the Pliocene, 

 as distinguished from that of the Quaternary jjeriod of 

 Europe, he was conducted to the examination of the Cave 

 fauna of England. In 1860 he communicated a memoir to the 

 Geological Society on the Ossiferous Caves of Gower explored 

 or discovered by his friend Colonel Wood, of Stout Hall.^ 

 The existence of Elephas antiquus and Rhinoceros hemitoechus 

 as members of the Cave fauna was then for the first time esta- 

 blished, and the age of that fauna precisely defined as pos- 

 teriorto the Boulder- clay, or period of the Glacial submergence 

 in England. At the time of his death he was busily engaged 

 in collecting materials for memoirs on the fossil remains of 

 Cervus, Hyaena, Spermophilus, and other genera.^ 



In 1860, while on a visit to Torquay, he was induced to 

 examine the vegetable fossils of the Bovey Tracey Coal, for 

 which he was prepared by previous researches on the vege- 

 table fossils of the Burdwan Coal in India,^ and he was led to 

 the conclusion that the Bovey Coal, which for twenty years 

 had vibrated in the minds of geologists between Eocene and 

 Post-Pliocene, belonged really to the Miocene and was in 

 correlation with the Coal formations of Germany and Swit- 

 zerland.-^ This opinion was confirmed by the more detailed 

 investigations of Professor Heer, the results of which were 

 embodied in a memoir presented to the Eoyal Society in 

 1862. 



While exploring the Himalayahs in his eai'ly days, Fal- 

 coner's attention had been closely directed to the physical 

 features which distinguished them from mountain ranges in 

 temperate regions, and more especially to the general absence 

 from their southern valleys of the great lakes so common in 

 corresponding situations m the Alps. When the hypothesis 



' See vol. ii. pp. 408, 430. 



2 See vol. ii. p. 498. 



' See vol. ii. pp 462 to 481. 



* See List of Botanical Memoirs and 



Keports at page Iv, No. 2. 



* Letter to His Grace the Duke of 

 Argyll, April, 1860. 



