A PRELIMINARY TREATISE 1 



ON THE 



RELATION OF THE PLEISTOCENE MAMMALIA TO THOSE 

 NOW LIVING IN EUROPE. 



CHAPTER L— INTRODUCTORY. 



The scope of Treatise : — Nomenclature, Definition of terms Eocene, Meiocene, Pleiocene,. 

 Prehistoric, Historic. Table of the division of the Tertiary Period. 



Scope of Treatise. 



There is no province of investigation which promises a richer harvest than that 

 stretching away from the borders of history back to the point, where the remote geolo- 

 gical horizon stands clearly defined. In it lies hidden the clue to those conditions 

 from which the present physical state of Europe arose, the climate, the distribution of 

 land and water, and the various races of animals which now inhabit its surface. An 

 adequate idea of what went before is indispensable to the right understanding of the 

 present order of things. My aim in this work is to see what evidence of the past is 

 afforded by the races of animals that have successively inhabited Europe from the 

 Pleiocene down to the present day. Such an attempt, however feeble, is at the present 

 time singularly opportune. Since the days when the immortal Cuvier made the scat- 

 tered bones in the gypsum quarries of Montmartre reveal the strange forms which 

 dwelt in France in Eocene times, the materials for a history of the Pleistocene Mam- 

 malia have gradually been accumulated. 



In France MM. de Serres, Croizet and Jobert, Gervais, Gaudry, and many others, have 

 explored the caves and river-deposits with remarkable success, and the late M. Lartet, in 



1 The first thirty-eight pages of this preliminary treatise were written in 1872. 



A 



