BRITISH BEARS AND WOLVES. 
245 
equally, being found only in the British caves, and not in the 
river deposits, which were probably of the same geological 
date. This peculiarity of distribution may be attributed to 
the habit of living in caves which characterised the creature, 
in common with the hyaena, and not, as M. Lartet supposes, 
from the creature not being here at the time the river-deposits 
were accumulated. But, however this may be, the creature 
passed away from France, Grermany, and Britain at the close of 
the quaternary or post-glacial age, and probably also from 
North Italy, since the occurrence of its remains in a cave which 
furnished also a polished stone-axe and pottery does not 
necessarily imply that it lingered there as late as the Neo- 
lithic age. Thus we have evidence that it appeared in Europe 
just before the glacial epoch, at the close of the pleiocene, 
and increased and multiplied during the post-glacial or quater- 
nary. age, at the close of which it became extinct. 
Thus far the evidence of the geological range of the animal 
is plain enough, but the eminent French palaeontologist, whose 
loss is so much to be deplored, M. Lartet, has attempted a 
scheme of classification by means of the cave-bear and other 
animals, which, as it seems to me, has been accepted by natu- 
ralists without sufficient grounds. He divides the quaternary 
series into four periods : u L’age du grand ours des cavernes, 
l’age de 1’ elephant et du rhinoceros, l’age du renne, et l’age de 
l’aurochs.’ The very simplicity of the system has made it 
popular. You find a cave-bear, and at once you have a date 
for the deposit in which it occurs ; you find an aurochs, and at 
once assign the stratum to the latest stage of the quaternary. 
Unfortunately, however, there are two objections, either of 
which is fatal to this mode of classification. In the first place, 
nobody could expect to discover the whole quaternary fauna 
buried in one spot. One animal could not fail to be better 
represented in one locality than in another, and therefore the 
contents of caves and river deposits must present some variation. 
The den of a hysena could hardly be expected to contain exactly 
the same animals as a cave which had been filled with bones by 
the action of water. It therefore follows that the very diversity 
which M. Lartet insists upon as representing different periods 
of time must necessarily have been the result of different 
animals occupying the same area at the same time. In the 
second place, M. Lartet has not advanced a shadow of proof as 
to which of these animals was the first to arrive in Europe. It 
is undoubtedly true that they died out one by one, and it is 
very probable that they came in also gradually. The fossil 
remains from the English caves and river deposits — as for 
instance those of Kent’s Hole, or Bedford — prove only that the 
animals inhabited Britain at the same time, and do not in the 
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