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• of our knowledge, since the bed from which he obtained his 
collection is merely a fragment in a mountain gorge, 300 paces 
long and GO paee3 in breadth, and of this he has been 
able to explore only a small portion. He reminds us that the 
region which was formerly the home of these vast herds of animals, 
which animals could only have existed in wide open plains, is now 
but an insignificant tract of mountainous country, 20 leagues by 
10 in size ; and this fact, which shows us what vast changes the 
physical configuration of Europe has recently undergone, will help 
us to understand why it is that so small a portion of former 
geological deposits is now left to us. 
Passing to the Pliocene deposits, which geologically are so near 
to those of our own days, it is not difficult to find illustrations 
of the imperfection of our knowledge. 
To take a case near home: the Coralline crag is a well-defined 
horizon of the Pliocene period ; all that is left to us in Great 
Britain of what must formerly have covered a considerable area, 
is an isolated mass or two, occupying altogether about ten square 
miles of country. Some years ago, a trial pit was sunk at Sutton, 
near Ipswich, in the hope of finding coprolites. At the base of 
the Coralline crag, a pliosphatic deposit was met with, containing 
half-a-dozen specimens of teeth, — of a mastodon, a rhinoceros, and 
a deer — with a few bones of cetaceans and sharks. Prof. Prestwick 
calls these fossils, from a geological point of view, a valuable col- 
lection, and this remark may show for what small discoveries 
geologists arc thankful. The pit was only seen by Messrs. 
Prestwick and Bay Lankester ; and a short time afterwards, not 
proving remunerative from a commercial point of view, it was 
filled in and levelled. There arc no other remains of terrestrial 
mammals known to us from any bed of the age of the Coralline 
crag in Northern Europe. 
The so-called Forest bed of the Norfolk coast is similarly an 
exemplification of the fragmentary character of the geological 
record. The specimens of the well-known Gunn collection in our 
Museum are obtained from a bed at the base of the cliffs of 
Norfolk and Suffolk. We have no inland section whatever of this 
