78 BEIT1SH AND EUROPEAN FOSSIL ELEPHANTS. 



Mario, Monte Verbo, and other localities in the sonth of 

 Italy. The measure of time involved in the thus implied 

 duration of the species is best appreciated by considering 

 some of the changes that appear to have taken place in 

 Europe during the interval. The Alps, the Pyrenees, and 

 the Apennines have all undergone a considerable amount of 

 elevation. When the earliest Elephants were roaming over 

 the emerged land of Italy, a wide and open sea communica- 

 tion would seem to have existed between the Mediterranean 

 and the Atlantic Ocean, admitting of a common province for 

 the Mollusca of the shores of the Crag-sea and of Italy, 

 and a common resort for the Whales and Dolphins which 

 abounded at that period in European waters. Portions of 

 the Pliocene sea-bottom of the Sub- Apennines, consisting of 

 stratified beds full of marine shells, and containing nearly 

 entire skeletons of Elephants and Rhinoceros, have been 

 thrown up into hills, which, after a long series of ages of 

 degradation, still maintain an elevation of 1,700 feet above 

 the level of the adjoining sea. Yet, if we are to accept the 

 confidently expressed opinion of Cuvier, long after his early 

 inferences had been questioned, the same form of Mammoth 

 lived through all these mighty changes, and it is only yes- 

 terday as it were, in relation to the human epoch, that its 

 last remnant was exterminated and frozen up in the perennial 

 ice-cliffs of the Arctic Circle. 



It will hardly be denied by any one who attempts to 

 reconcile the English and Continental classifications, that 

 the arrangement of the newer Tertiary and Glacial deposits 

 in successive chronological order is at present in a very 

 unsatisfactory state, probably more so than that of any part 

 of the older Tertiary series ; and it appears to me that 

 nothing has contributed more to retard the progress of this 

 section of geology in Britain than the generally accepted 

 belief in the specific unity of the Mammoth, wherever fossil 

 remains of Elephants were discovered in European strata. 

 The percentage of extinct Mollusca, so valuable a guide in 

 the identification of the middle Tertiaries, becomes in the 

 newer Tertiaries an evanescent quantity — at every step more 

 elusive as we ascend upwards ; and if the geologist tried to 

 extract some help from the associated Mammalian remains, 

 he was at once perplexed by the ubiquitous presence of the 

 Mammoth. The very name of Elephas primigenius was sug- 

 gestive of ' transported gravel,' ' diluvial action,' ' glacial 

 drift,' or some other explanation suggested by the image of 

 the Woolly Mammoth, frozen in, flesh and bone, at the 

 mouth of the Lena ; so that every stratum in which Ele- 

 phant bones were met with was regarded in some degree 



