PLEISTOCENE CLIMATE AND MAMMALIA. 
389 
the only proof that it lived in Britain at that remote time. 
An examination also of the tables of the distribution of the 
animals proves, that so far as Great Britain and Ireland are 
concerned, the attempt to form a chronology, based on the 
presence of the mammoth, reindeer, cave-bear, and bison, has 
failed, because all the species are found indifferently mixed up 
together under the same conditions. I shall therefore treat 
the mammalia, both from caves and river beds, as being of the 
same age and belonging to the same fauna. 
The Pleistocene land fauna of Great Britain, consisting of 
forty-eight species, may be divided into five well-marked 
groups, which will be examined separately : the first compre- 
hending all the extinct species ; the second, those still inhabit- 
ing the temperate zone of Europe ; the third, those common to 
northern and tropical climates; the fourth, those confined to 
southern climates at the present day ; and lastly, those confined 
to the inclement regions of the north. 
The extinct group consists of nine, or perhaps ten, animals: 
the sabre-toothed machairodus, of Kent’s Hole, and the narrow- 
toothed Elephas antiquus ; the two slenderly-built rhinoceroses, 
the megarhine, and the E. hemitoechus of Dr. Falconer (U. 
leptorhinus of Owen), the tichorhine species, the cave-bear, the 
Irish Elk, the Cervus Browni\ ; the mammoth, and possibly the 
Hippopotamus major . The last may possibly be represented 
at the present day by the larger African species. The first 
four and the last of these animals were of a southern habitat 
in Europe : the cave-bear, the Irish elk, and ( Cervus Browni) 
Brown’s deer — the representative of the fallow deer of the 
Mediterranean — were dwellers in the temperate zone ; while 
the mammoth was almost cosmopolitan, occurring alike in 
France and Spain, and living alike on the fruit and leaves of 
the Scotch fir in Siberia, and the rich vegetation of the lower 
basin of the Mississippi. The woolly rhinoceros, on the other 
hand, was an animal that did not range in the Pleistocene 
times further south than the Alps and Pyrenees, while north- 
wards and eastwards it extended as far over the whole of 
Siberia, and the now submerged area to its north, near the 
mouths of the Lena and the Indigirka. The Irish elk is the 
only animal that survived its extinct companions of the 
Pleistocene age, ultimately to disappear from the face of the 
earth during the time that the pre-historic peat-bogs and 
alluvia were being accumulated. 
The mammoth' and the woolly rhinoceros are the only two 
extinct forms that characterise the Pleistocene deposits, being 
found neither in the pleiocene nor in the pre-historic strata. 
The second group, consisting of those Pleistocene species 
which still inhabit the temperate zones of Europe and America, 
VOL. X. — NO. XLI. D D 
