268 Physical Geography. 



should have been destitute of all mammalian life, for it 

 seems more than absurd to suppose, that none of these 

 animals should have found their way into our area, 

 while they swarmed in regions so near as Switzerland, 

 France, and the Ehine, where, however, at that time no 

 Rhine existed. On the contrary, I, for one, take it for 

 granted that some of them must have inhabited the 

 southern ground of our British area, where the old lake 

 of Bovey Tracey lay in a latitude not two degrees further 

 north than that old lake of the Valley of the Ehine, 

 which in those days, between the mountains of the 

 Black Forest and the Vosges, stretched all the way 

 from Basle to Mayence and the neighbourhood of Bin- 

 gen. The banks of that lake were inhabited by the same 

 mammalia that inhabits the adjoining area of the great 

 Miocene Swiss lakes, and we may readily believe that, 

 in the physiography of the south British area, there 

 was nothing inimical to the thriving of such species, 

 for its climate was then warm, and its great plains, 

 tablelands, valleys, and mountains, were doubtless 

 clothed with a rich vegetation. This, however, we may 

 assume, that, just as we pass northward, the vegetation 

 of the day assumed a more northern type, so in the 

 mountain land of that older Scotland, and on its west- 

 ern flanks, where lofty volcanoes were growing, the fauna 

 would get mingled with northern forms, all of which 

 seem to be lost to us even in a fossil state, the physical 

 conditions of the British area having been of a kind, 

 that no bi'oad and thick sediments were deposited in 

 which the bones of mammals could be preserved. 



It is, however, possible, and indeed probable, that we 

 get a glimpse of part of this mammalian life preserved 

 in a curiously mingled fauna, the remains of which lie 

 buried at the base of various members of the Crag. I 



