PREFACE. 



Since the time when Baron Cuvier published the last edition of his great work, the 

 ' Ossemens Fossiles,' in 1825, the materials for working out, in detail, the British Pleisto- 

 cene Mammalia, of which Professor Owen had given an admirable outline in 1846, have 

 been steadily and rapidly increasing. Our great National Museum has been supple- 

 mented by other public ones in most of the principal towns, in which the past Pauna and 

 Plora of their respective districts are carefully preserved. The zeal of private collectors 

 also has added very largely to the heap of accumulated facts, which only have to be com- 

 pared and brought to a focus to enable us to realise, in all their varieties of size and form, 

 the animals that lived upon that portion of the Pleistocene continent which now forms 

 Great Britain and Ireland. Zoology also has made great strides, and, armed with a more 

 perfect knowledge of the present order of things, we are daily becoming more fitted to in- 

 vestigate profitably the past. In undertaking to bring the Mammalogy of the Pleistocene 

 up to the requirements of the day, we are conscious of our own shortcomings and of the 

 magnitude of the task. We propose, by adopting the form of a series of Monographs 

 upon each species, and by not commencing a second species until we have exhausted all 

 the attainable information upon the one we may have in hand, to leave the work in such 

 a state that it may be continued by any successors without alteration of plan. 



We do not pledge ourselves to bring out the Monographs in zoological order, but just 

 as our materials may admit of the complete description of any Pleistocene genus. This 

 arrangement, as each Monograph will be distinct from the rest, like those composing M. 

 de Blainville's ' Osteographie et Odontographie,' will not affect their being bound up in 

 their proper order on the completion of the work. 



For any information as to the remains of Pleistocene Mammals in private cabinets, or 

 anywhere else in Great Britain or Ireland, we shall be extremely obliged, as we wish to 

 give the distribution and relative numbers of every fossil Pleistocene species. 



W. BOYD DAWKINS. 



W. AYSHPORD SANPORD. 



February/, 18G6. 



