INTRODUCTION. xvii 



Gervais^ have used it, as the exact equivalent of the Post-pliocene of Sir Charles Lyell, the 

 Quaternary of the French geologists and Mr. Prestwich, and the Preglacial and Glacial 

 divisions of Professor PhilHps. It appHes to all formations from the top of the Norwich 

 Crag up to the Prehistoric deposits, comprising the Preglacial Porest-bed, the Glacial drift, 

 the Post-glacial brickearths, loams, gravels, and the contents of the older ossiferous caverns. 

 The discussion of the characteristic mammalia of each |^of these we must leave to a 

 future day, when we hope to enter fully upon the distribution of the Pleistocene mam- 

 malia in Britain and Ireland. In the south of France the ossiferous caverns of Perigord 

 connect it with the Prehistoric deposits, and mark an epoch when a people, probably 

 closely alhed to the Esquimaux, lived on the banks of the Dordogne.^ 



§ 7. Pleistocene caverns and river-deposits. — The writings of Sir Charles Lyell, Dr. 

 Buckland, Professor Morris, Messrs. Godwin-Austen, Prestwich, Trimmer, MacEnery, 

 Dr. Falconer, Boyd Dawkins, and many others, on the remains derived from Pleistocene 

 caverns and river-deposits are so well known that to enter into details about them 

 would be superfluous in this Introduction. Their concurrent testimony proves that, 

 while the great majority of caverns owe their contents to the falling of animals into open 

 fissures, and the transporting power of water, others have been inhabited for ages by 

 hyaenas and other animals, and filled with the remains of their prey, and that the 

 gravels, loams, and brickearths, which are sometimes very high above the level of the 

 nearest stream, were deposited by a river flowing at a far higher level than at present, 

 that has cut down its bed to its present level, and that the remains from the caverns and 

 the river-deposits are, geologically speaking, of the same date. A list of the mammalia of 

 each will be given subsequently. 



A short summary of the Pleistocene mammalia will not be out of place in this Intro- 

 duction, though, no doubt, our views will be altered in many points as our investigations 

 become more extended. The list of species will also probably be increased. Before, how- 

 ever, we enter upon this, we must define what we mean by the determination and identifi- 

 cation of a fossU species. 



§ 8. Till within the last few years the idea that the succession of life in the rocks is 

 the result of a series of acts of creation and destruction, and that therefore the fauna of any 

 given geological period is insulated from that which has gone before and that which comes 

 after, has insensibly affected^ most of the palaeontologists who have investigated the Pleisto- 



' Gervais, ' Paleotitologie Frangaise,' 4to, 1859. 



2 MM. Ed. Lartet et H. Christy, 'Revue Archcologique,' 1864. ' 



" On considere ordinairement le terrain diluvien comme separe de I'epoque moderne par les charactferes 



aussi tranches que ceux qui distinguent les trois etages de la periode tertiaire .... c'est-^-dire qu'^ la fin 



de cette periode toutes les espcces ont ete aneanties et qu'une nouvelle creation a repeuple la terre ^ 



I'origine de I'epoque moderne." (' Paleontologie,' parM. Pictet, vol. i, p. 359, first edit.) Professor Pictet 



C 



