REPORT ON THE EXPLORATION OF BRIXHAM CAVE. 
547 
"We may perhaps thus see some reason for imagining that there has been a very 
gradual succession in northern Europe of ursine species. Not to go further back, we 
find the gigantic TJrsus speleeus of the German caverns, if not abounding, at any rate 
existing at an early period in these islands, if islands they then were. When it first 
became associated with U. priscus we have perhaps no means of knowing, but that in 
progress of time it gradually gave way to the latter seems to be highly probable. It 
survived, however, in all probability, sufficiently long to be associated also with 
TJ. arctos, which in its turn seems to have supplanted U. priscus ( U. ferox fossil is). 
There is no reason to suppose, but quite the contrary, since we find that they were 
coexistent, that either of the smaller forms represents a degenerate descendant from the 
larger. 
When the conditions of nature were such as to allow of the flourishing in these 
countries of the Cave-Lion and Hyeena, together with that of the gigantic herbivorous 
mammals, it is pretty clear that the Bear of that day to hold his own against such 
competitors must have possessed corresponding powers. But as these conditions 
changed, the change, in all probability, was to the advantage of a smaller and less 
powerful ursine carnivore. This form would flourish, as the Grisly Bear does at the 
present day, so long, and only so long, as the external conditions resembled those 
under which U. ferox now exists in North America. As that species is probably 
destined before very long to disappear, and perhaps to be wholly replaced by TJ. ameri- 
canus , so in this hemisphere TJ. prisons became gradually replaced by TJ. arctos , a 
species which probably (in part from its less purely carnivorous habit, but in part also 
perhaps from its greater variability and consequently greater adaptability to circum- 
stances) has become the sole representative of the ursine genus in the northern parts 
of the Old World. 
That the Grisly Bear should have existed here at a remote period is of course no 
more strange than that Ovihos moschatus should at one time, and perhaps at the same 
epoch, have been a member of the British fauna. And their companion, the Reindeer, 
is another instance pretty nearly of the same kind, common though it still be to both 
continents. The Beaver also might be cited as an American inhabitant of Britain down 
to a very late period, were it certain that the American and European species were 
identical. The Lagomys , again, is at present as far removed from us, or nearly so, as 
TJ. ferox*. 
* Since the above was written, I have devoted a good deal of attention to the subject of the American 
Bears, and have come to the conclusion that in all probability there are two distinct species, or at any rate 
very distinct subspecies, included under U. ferox ( horribilis , Ord) — a larger one found, as it would seem, mostly 
to the west of the Rocky Mountains, as in California &c., and the other and smaller more to the north and 
even to the east of that range, the former being the true Grisly Bear, and the latter the so-termed “ Barren 
Ground Bear” (apparently the form named U. horriceus, Baird). Nor is it impossible that the same two forms 
might have coexisted at a former period in these islands. 
