578 W. BOYD DAWETNS ON THE EXISTENCE OE 



for the second find of skull of a male in the uuviatile gravel of 

 Green Street Green near Bromley in Kent, associated with the 

 remains of a bison. A third case is the discovery of portions of 

 male and female skulls by Mr. Charles Moore in the gravels of the 

 Avon at Ereshford, near Bath, along with the mammoth, bison, horse, 

 and reindeer. 



The animal has also been discovered in the gravels of the valley 

 of the Severn at Barnwood, near Gloucester, by Mr. Lucy, in 

 association with the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros ; and in those 

 of the Wiley at Eisherton, near Salisbury, along with the same 

 group of animals and the stag, wild boar, pouched marmot, lem- 

 ming, wolf, lion, and striped hyaena. In all these cases the pre- 

 sence of the Northern group of mammalia and of the mammoth and 

 woolly rhinoceros, coupled with the absence of survivors from the 

 Pliocene fauna, make the time of its sojourn in Britain to be late 

 Pleistocene ; nor can there be any doubt as to the animal having 

 inhabited the valley of the Severn in postglacial times, since the 

 gravel* composed of the neighbouring Oolites, in which its remains 

 occur, rests upon the older postglacial gravel, which was formed by 

 the break-up of glacial deposits with erratics by the streams. In this 

 ease the evidence is perfect that the animal was in Britain long after 

 the retreat of the ice from the valley of the Severn, and after the 

 emergence of that low-lying district from beneath the waves of the 

 Glacial sea, 



5. Present in Britain in Mid and Early Pleistocene Ages. 



The discovery of the skull of a fine old male in 1866 by myself 

 and Mr. Plaxman Spurrell in the Lower Brick-earth of the 

 Thames Valley at Crayl'ord proved that the musk-sheep was present 

 in an older fauna than the above, a fauna from which the arctic 

 mammalia with this solitary exception are absent, while the Pliocene 

 species are represented by Rhinoceros megarhinus. 



Since that time a few isolated teeth have been discovered atErith 

 in the same strata by Messrs. Cheadle and Woodward. It was 

 therefore living in the valley of the Thames during that Mid 

 Pleistocene division, according to my classification. The relation of 

 this deposit to the Boulder-clays further to the north seems to me to 

 be defined by the fact that it underlies the confused strata known 

 under the name of 4i Trail," in which the action of either ice or snow 

 is obvious in the transport of angular masses of soft Woolwich Clays 

 at Erith, and that this trail on the side north of the Thames at Ilford 

 is composed of materials in part derived from the Boulder-clays of 

 the district, even if it be not Boulder-clay rearranged in situ. The 

 Lower Brick-earths, too, differ from, the other fiuviatile deposits in the 

 Thames valley in the fact that they contain no erratics, and therefore 

 must have been formed before the erratics were brought into the 

 area of the Thames valley by the ice, and before the streams had 



* Lucy, "The Gravels of the Severn, Avon, and Evenlode," CotteswoldClub, 

 April 7, 1869, p. 8. The oolite-gravel of Barnwood is seen at Kingsholna over- 

 lying the gravel with erratics. 



