PHYSICAL CONDITIONS— PLEISTOCENE. 347 



more genial temperature. Is it not possible, therefore, to imagine 

 that man of an earlier period should have found in his industry 

 the necessary resources for struggling against the conditions 

 which the transition from the later Secondary to the earlier 

 Tertiary must have imposed upon him ? " There is unquestion- 

 ably much force in what M. Quatrefages says ; nevertheless, 

 most geologists will agree with him that the question of man's 

 Miocene age still remains to be demonstrated by unequivocal 

 evidence. At present, all that we can safely say is that man 

 was probably living in Europe near the close of the Pliocene 

 Period, and that he was certainly an occupant of our continent 

 during glacial and interglacial times. That being so, let us try 

 to picture to ourselves the climatic and geographical conditions 

 of which he must have been a witness towards the end of the 

 Pleistocene Period. 



Let us suppose, then, that the penultimate glacial epoch 

 had come, and was again passing away to give place to the last 

 interglacial era. The great northern ice-sheet which had over- 

 flowed the plains of Northern Germany had melted away, the 

 British area had likewise become divested of its glacial cover- 

 ing, and in the mountain-valleys of the Alps and other elevated 

 regions in Central and Southern Europe the glaciers were 

 dwindling to moderate proportions. The northern fauna and 

 flora at the same time were gradually retreating towards alpine 

 heights and boreal regions, while the low grounds of Central 

 and North-western Europe, slowly acquiring a temperate climate, 

 were being reclothed and repeopled by those tribes and families 

 of plants and animals which were now returning to their former 

 homes. The reindeer, the musk-sheep, and their congeners had 

 forsaken the plains of France, and had retreated northwards from 

 Germany, Belgium, and England ; the mammoth and the tem- 

 perate group of mammalia — urus, bison, Irish deer, stag, roe, 

 horse, saiga, wild -cat, wolf, bear, lion, hysena, and their 

 humbler associates — beaver, hare, rabbit, stoat, weasel, etc. — 

 were now the common forms to be seen in Central and North- 

 western Europe. When the meridian of the last interglacial 



