ii PLEISTOCENE MAMMALIA. 



conjunction with our countryman Mr. Christy, has unfolded a chapter in the history of man 

 that had been hidden for untold centuries in the Reindeer caves of Auvergne. In Belgium 

 the labours of Dr. Schmerling have been successfully resumed by M. Dupont, and the 

 same race of men which inhabited Auvergne has been proved to have lived in the valley 

 of the Meuse. In our own country the exploration of caves, begun by Mr. Whidby in 1816, 

 has been carried on by MacEnery, Austen, Falconer, Busk, Pengelly, Sanford, myself, and 

 others, and at the present time is being prosecuted by the British Association in Devon- 

 shire and Yorkshire, while the fluviatile deposits have been worked out by Lyell, Evans, 

 Prestwich, Austen, and Lucy, and many others. The caves also of Germany, Gibraltar, 

 Sicily, and Malta have been ransacked, and the evidence offered by their contents has 

 been carefully tabulated. Nor has the badly defined interval of time between the Pleis- 

 tocene on the one hand and history on the other been neglected. The archaeologists 

 have proved that throughout Europe there existed before the dawn of history bronze-using 

 races, unacquainted with iron, and that they were preceded by men ignorant of all metals, 

 except gold, and shaping implements and weapons out of bone and stone for their various 

 needs. The naturalists have been studying the class of animals, wild and domestic, by 

 which these ancient prehistoric dwellers in Europe were surrounded. Prof. Nilsson in 

 Sweden, Dr. Steenstrup in Denmark, and Dr. Rutimeyer in Switzerland, have described 

 the prehistoric fauna of their respective countries, and my own investigation into the 

 Mammalia associated with the remains of men of the neolithic, bronze, and iron ages, has 

 resulted in the proof that the alluvia and peat-bogs, termed " recent" by Sir Charles 

 Lyell, are contemporaneous with the three archaeological divisions. Within the frontiers 

 of history evidence of the changes in the mammal-fauna lies buried in the works of the 

 classical writers, and of mediaeval annalists, in the legal enactments, and the metrical graces 

 of pious monks. 



To reduce this enormous and varied mass of facts to a definite order, and to form a 

 connected story of the past, has been attempted by several writers during the last few 

 years. Sir Charles Lyell, Sir John Lubbock, and more recently Dr. Hamy, have grap- 

 pled with the problem of the antiquity of man and the growth of his civilisation, making 

 man the centre around which all the phenomena are grouped. 



In this treatise the subject will be approached purely from the point of view offered 

 by natural history, which is, to a great extent, complementary of that offered by man, and 

 the most important facts out of the vast number which have been recorded will be 

 woven, so far as may be, into one continuous narrative. 



The wild animals are of equal interest to the geologist, the archaeologist, and the 

 historian ; for they afford to the first a means of classifying the deposits with which he has 

 to deal, while in archaeology and history they bear a direct relation to the members and 

 civilisation of the human dwellers in the same region. They are also valuable to the 

 geographer and physicist, since the occurrence of the same animals in islands as on the 

 adjacent continent implies a continuity of land between them in former times, and the 



