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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
and been replaced by new forms. The Professor therefore concludes that 
the Palaeozoic time , of which we have no record, must be regarded as far 
longer than that represented by the whole series of known Palaeozoic 
rocks. 
Mr. Carter has described the skull of a Bos primigenius , from the peat 
of Reach, in Cambridgeshire, offering more satisfactory evidence than 
anything hitherto known of the co-existence in England of man with the 
supposed ancestor of our domestic cattle. The skull was found beneath 
7 feet of peat, and with it most of the skeleton, though there were few 
limb bones, and not many ribs. It was brought to Cambridge, still much 
covered with peat, and sold. The investing matter was duly removed, and 
then became visible a chipped stone celt driven far into the skull, and 
broken off level with the frontal bone. The fracture was old, the flint 
was old, the bone around it was depressed, and the weapon, which passed 
obliquely through the sphenoid into the orbit, penetrating the brain-cavity 
for three inches, was firmly wedged in the skull. The flint appeared to 
have been one of those elongated narrow forms with sub-parallel sides 
which are supposed to have been unknown in the earlier Stone age. It 
was conjectured that the tool had been lashed to a pole, and so used, when 
the ox was running, to deliver the blow which, from being accidentally 
oblique, has from its violence snapped the celt. Mr. Carter did not regard 
the specimen as bearing on the antiquity of our species, and thought it 
rather an evidence that the beast lived to very modern times than that man 
was an ancient denizen of the land. This is an echo of the idea broached 
by Mr. Prestwich on the chipped flints from the gravel, and cannot be 
received with too great caution, for the facts of the case are these : 
Here in the peat of the Bedford Level are found Bos primigenius , Bos 
frontosus, Cervus Hibernicus, and Bos longifrons, all of which are extinct ; 
the last species going for little, since it frequently occurs in Roman graves. 
The existing species are not animals now common in the country, and 
must all be regarded as becoming extinct ; among them are the brown 
bear, the wolf, otter, beaver, wild hog, roebuck, red deer, &c., altogether 
not more than twelve. Now, when one-fourth of a fauna has died out, 
and the remainder, even though for obvious reasons, disappeared, it cannot 
but be supposed that the change indicates a remote antiquity for the 
stratum in which their remains are entombed. Had the skull been an 
ordinary one, unassociated with human work, beyond question this anti- 
quity would never have been doubted ; and, therefore, the legitimate con- 
clusion from a specimen like this seems to be, that in the days of the Irish 
ElJc, beef was already the food of a Briton, courageous and skilful enough 
to hunt and slaughter the most formidable beast of his time. 
Professor Harkness has written elaborately on the Skiddaw slates, 
tracing their features through the Lake district. He estimates their 
average thickness in the North of England at 7,000 feet. The mineral 
character varies so much from place to place as to be worthless for division 
of the deposit into subordinate groups. From both fossil and physical 
features the Professor regards the Skiddaw slates as of Llandeill age. 
These strata appear to be the metropolis of the graptolites, and yield to 
