13 
conclude better than by quoting tbe following apposite 
remarks by a writer in Land and Water, signed Alces " : — 
" The study of northern zoology presents a variety of considerations 
interesting both to the student of recent nature and to the palaeontolo- 
gist. Taking as well-known instances the reindeer and musk ox, 
there are forms yet inhabiting the Arctic and sub- Arctic regions, which 
may be justly regarded as the remains of an ancient Fauna which once 
comprised many species now long since extinct, and which, with those 
already named, occupied a far greater southerly extent of each of the 
continents converging on the pole than would be possible under the 
present climatal conditions of the world. With those great types which 
have entirely disappeared before man had recorded their existence in 
the pages of history, including the mammoth ( Elephas primigenius ), 
the most abundant of the fossil pachyderms, whose bones so crowd the 
beaches and islands of the Polar Sea that in parts the soil seems 
altogether composed of them, the Rhinoceros tichorinus, and others, 
were associated genera a few species of which lived on into the historic 
period, and have since become extinct ; whilst others, occupying 
restricted territory, are apparently on the verge of disappearance. 
'AH the species of European pliocene boyidae came down to the 
historical period,' states Professor Owen, in his British Fossil Mammals, 
' and the aurochs and musk ox still exist ; but the one owes its 
preservation to special imperial protection, and the other has been 
driven, like the reindeer, to higher northern latitudes.' Well authen- 
ticated as is the occurrence of the rangifer as a fossil deer of the upper 
tertiaries, the evidence of its association, in ages so remote, with Cervus 
alces, has been somewhat a matter of doubt. The elk and the reindeer 
have always been associated in descriptions of zoology of high latitudes 
by modern naturalists, as they w^ere when the boreal climate, coniferous 
forests, and mossy bogs of Ancient Gaul brought them under notice of 
the classic pens of Caesar, Pausanias, and Pliny. And there is some- 
thing in common to both of these singular deer which would seem to 
connect them equally with the period when they and the gigantic con- 
temporary genera, now extinct, roamed over so large a portion of the 
earth's surface in the north temperate zone, where the fir-tree — itseK 
geologically t3rpical of a great antiquity — constituted a predominant 
vegetation. 
" The presence of the remains of Cermis alces in association with those 
of the mammoth, the great fossil musk ox (Ovibos), the fossil rein- 
deer, and two forms of bison, in the fossiliferous ice-cliffs of Eschscholtz 
