422 Symonds — British Fossil Mammals. 



the difference between the flowers and trees which grew in the 

 Arctic zone and those that grew on the sites of what is now Devon- 

 shire and the Isle of Wight. The latter were more tropical in 

 character. And now we return once more to the Pre -glacial and 

 Post-glacial epochs. The Pre-glacial plants in the Forest-bed of 

 Norfolk, which are found associated with the numerous fossil 

 Mammalia I have already alluded to, are plants that indicate a 

 somewhat colder climate than now exists in Norfolk, as is shown 

 by the presence of Scotch and spruce firs, northern firs which are 

 not now indigenous to Norfolk. In Pre-glacial times we have 

 evidence of the climate being colder than at present, and far colder 

 than in Tertiary days. The Glacial epoch proper succeeds, and 

 this term, '' Glacial epoch," should be understood to apply to those 

 unnumbered ages when the cold stole gradually on over Pre-glacial 

 lands 'and continents, and drove the Mammoth from the frozen 

 North, and wrapped Northern and temperate Europe and the 

 British Isles with snow, and ice, and glaciers, as North Greenland 

 is covered now ; also to that later period when much of Northern 

 Europe and the British Isles were submerged beneath the waves of 

 a Glacial sea. The term Post-glacial may apply to those subsequent 

 periods when the present lands re-emerged from the sea, and when, 

 though great cold was still prevalent, and glaciers swept down 

 from every mountain in Wales and Scotland, the climate was 

 ameliorating, and a more temperate change was gradually 

 coming on, until the floating iceberg vanished from the British 

 seas, the glacier melted from the heights of Snowdon, Ben 

 Nevis, and Carran Tual, and the Arctic plants died out among 

 the vales of England to linger only among her mountain tops. 

 But it was before this change from Glacial times that the animals of 

 the Apperley collection lived and died, and left their bones to tell 

 us of their history among the old river-beds and sea-side caves of 

 ancient England. Little by little we gather the fragments of the 

 past, and the geologist, the botanist, and the comparative anatomist, 

 labour to bring the fragments together, and to restore, with some 

 degree of accuracy, the records ot the men, the animals, the plants, 

 and the climate of Europe, which in Post-glacial times preceded 

 our owm. And what are those records ? Why that in Post-glaical 

 times, when the land of Great Britain was fashioned much as it is 

 now, and the hills rose, and the vales swept down, and the rivers 

 flowed as you now behold them, bitter cold still lingered. The 

 winter's snow and ice filled every valley, the sea-straits were frozen 

 more than half the year round, and the long-haired elephant and 

 rhinoceros, with the musk-ox, the bison, and the elk, roamed over 

 the ice from France and Germany to the downs of Salisbury and 

 Malvem, and along the banks of a frozen Avon, Severn, and Wye. 

 And the hunter man was with them, for, entombed in the old drifts 

 which were deposited by melting ice and snow, or swept down by 

 ice-traversed rivers, or gathered together in caves no longer 

 washed by torrential streams, we find the bones, weapons, and even 

 the ornaments of the rude race which feasted on the mammoth, the 



