﻿xvi INTRODUCTION. 



south of Prance, it lingered on after the disappearance of its Pleistocene congeners — the 

 lion, the hysena, and the great pachyderms. 



§ 5. Inferences as to Prehistoric Climate in Britain, 8fc. — The evidence of a gradual 

 increase of temperature in France and Germany during the historical period seems to us 

 perfectly incontrovertible. Firstly, the Rhine and the Danube 1 , during the first four cen- 

 turies, were frequently frozen over in the winter, so that the barbarians, " who often chose 

 that severe season for their inroads, transported, without apprehension or danger, their 

 numerous armies, their cavalry, and their heavy waggons, over a vast and solid bridge of 

 ice." 2 On the banks of the Danube the wine was frequently frozen into great lumps. 3 

 Secondly,* Caesar mentions the reindeer as existing in the great Hercynian Forest that 

 overspread Northern Germany, along with the gigantic TJrus and the elk. This statement 

 of Caesar is singularly corroborated by the discovery in the peat-bogs of Pomerania 5 of the 

 remains of these three animals, so that there can be no reasonable doubt of his accuracy 

 in this particular case. Modern ages afford no instance of like phenomena. From some 

 cause or other, the temperature has increased on the banks of the Rhine ; and in the fact 

 that at the present moment the reindeer 6 cannot live south of the Baltic we may recognise 

 a proof of a diminution of cold in that region since it was inhabited by those lovers of a 

 severe climate. This change of temperature is very generally accounted for by the drain- 

 age of morasses and the cutting down of woods ; but may it not with more probability be 

 ascribed to a much deeper cause — to a secular change operating throughout Europe, 

 which began in the Pleistocene, and was going on throughout the Prehistoric, and happened 

 incidentally to be noticed in the Historical period ? The presence of the reindeer in the 

 Prehistoric deposits of England, Ireland, and Scotland, affords precisely the same evidence 

 as those mentioned by Caesar. At the time they lived in Britain and Ireland the climate 

 must have been suited for them. On the theory of the gradual modification of climate 

 through the Prehistoric and Historical periods, the fact of the manufactured ivory and the 

 tusk preserved in the cave-earth of Paviland, cited above, being in precisely the same state 

 of preservation, is alone explicable. There may have been oscillations of temperature, but 

 the progress on the whole seems to us to have been gradual from the intense cold of the 

 glacial period to the temperate " insular climate " obtaining in Britain at the present day. 



§ 6. The term Pleistocene is used in the same sense as Professor Forbes and M. 



1 Diodorus Siculus, i, 5, p. 340, edit. Wesselling. Herodian, i, 6, p. 221. 



2 Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,' chap. ix. 



3 Ovid, 'Epist. ex Ponto,' Lib. 4, ep. 7, Lin. 9, 10. Virgil, 'Georgic,' Lib. 3, Lin. 355. Zenophon's 

 'Anabasis,' i, 7. 



i ' De Bello Gallico,' vi, 23. 



5 Professor Nilsson, " On Extinct and Existing Bovida? of Scandinavia ;" ' Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist.,' 

 1849, p. 264. 



6 See Zimmerman, Specimen Zool. Geograph., 4to, 1778, p. 285. 



