ON PLEISTOCENE CLIMATE AND THE DELATION 
OF THE PLEISTOCENE MAMMALIA TO THE 
GLACIAL PEKIOD. 
By W. BOYD DAWKINS, M.A., F.R.S., F.G.S. 
[PLATE LXXVIIL] 
T HE animals which inhabited northern France, Germany, 
and Britain, during the Pleistocene* age, have been de- 
fined with the greatest accuracy by M. Lartet, Dr. Falconer, 
Professor Busk, and others, and probably will not be largely 
increased by any future discoveries. There are, however, 
certain inferences to be drawn from the comparison of the 
present with the former range of the Pleistocene animals, both as 
to climate and geography, which have not been brought pro- 
minently forward. The delicate question also of their relation 
to the glacial period, which has been sub judice for the last 
twenty years, demands a careful attention. In the following 
essay I shall attempt to show to what extent it may be solved 
by an appeal to the localities in Great Britain and Ireland, in 
which they have been discovered. I have already proved in 
the “ Quarterly Geological Journal ” for 1869, p. 192, that the 
contents of the bone caves and of the river deposits of Great 
Britain are, zoologically speaking, of the same age, and that 
the absence of one or two animals in the one or the other does 
not necessarily imply a difference in point of time. The cave 
bear is probably absent from the river beds because it was an 
inhabitant of caves, and was not liable to be swept down by 
the floods and buried in the river gravels and alluvia, just as 
the squirrel is absent from both, because of its arboreal habits : 
it has left the gnawed nut-shells in the Cromer forest bed as 
* The term Pleistocene is used in this essay as the precise equivalent of 
the term Quaternary, and as the natural name of the stage succeeding the 
Pleiocene. The Forest-bed mammalia, which I have formerly included in 
the Preglacial division of the Pleistocene, are relegated to the passage beds 
of the Pleiocene, or the Upper Pleiocene. Evidence for this change of no- 
menclature will shortly be published. 
