296 Dr Fleming on the Influence of Society on the 
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banished from many districts on the Continents, and are daily 
becoming scarcer in those places where they yet maintain them- 
selves. 
These changes have all taken place in the course of the last six 
or eight centuries. In the ages which have preceded, the same 
causes must have been in more or less active operation, and the 
chasms produced in our Fauna, in consequence, may have been 
much more extensive, than, without due consideration, we are 
disposed to admit. But on this subject, the documents of his- 
tory are unavailing, and the voice of tradition is silent. Nor 
need this excite our astonishment. The objects now interesting 
to us, from their scarcity, must have been uninteresting to the 
early inhabitants of this country, from an opposite cause. And 
the changes which w T e are so eager to investigate, would, from 
their being gradual, fail to arrest the attention of savage tribes. 
Fortunately, however, the silence of history, though sufficiently 
annoying, need not prevent us from conducting our researches 
into the changes of remoter times. Memorials remain, as une- 
quivocal as those of history, attesting the revolutions which 
certain species of animals have experienced, once the cotempora- 
ries of man, and the lower animals still his companions on the 
earth. 
In our Peat-Bogs , we find the remains of those ancient fo- 
rests, with which the country was clothed, even to a compara- 
tively recent period, and in the marl beds which occur below, 
are preserved the memorials of those various animals to which 
these woods afforded shelter and nourishment. In these marl 
beds, the recent formation of which is not disputed by any class 
of geologists, are occasionally found the bones of the horse, ox, 
deer, boar, and beaver, in company with the shells of those mo- 
luscous animals which are yet to be met with in almost every 
pool. Among these remains, some of the bones seem to have 
belonged to larger individuals than are to be met with among 
those varieties of the species which are known at present. This 
remark is particularly applicable to the skulls of the ox, and the 
horns of the stag, which frequently occur. 
Were these skeletons, the onlv memorials of the former inha- 
bitants of the country, they would add nothing to the documents 
furnished by history. Their accompaniments, however, are of the 
