The Ancient Fauna of Essex. 
13 
taken place in the physical as well as the climatic conditions 
of this country to enable animals of such varied habits, 
many of whom possess strong migratory instincts, to have 
inhabited our Island. It seems absolutely necessary that 
we must carry back the period at which these animals 
lived, to a time when our Island was not separated from 
the Continent, as it now is, but when the North Sea and 
the Straits of Dover were all closed and formed one solid 
stretch of land, passing from the Humber across to Heli¬ 
goland and the coast of Denmark, and also from Norfolk 
to Holland and from Dover to France. Then again, the 
southern portions of our island must have been connected 
with Brittany. It would only require an elevation of six 
hundred feet to connect England with Ireland,—and someone 
has said that it would be a very happy event if we were 
so connected with Ireland now, because then the people 
could not clamour, as they are doing, for separation. 
The Bhine, the Meuse, and Moselle must have, at that time, 
all flowed northward. But what is most interesting is, that 
there are certain hanks very well known to the fisherman, 
where good dredging is done, and good trawling,— par¬ 
ticularly the one known as the “Dogger Bank,”—which have 
yielded, from the beginning of this century up to the present 
time probably many thousand remains of the true Mammoth, 
Elephas primigemus (fig. 6), the one which in past times spread 
over the whole of Northern Europe, and whose remains have 
been found so abundantly in the frozen mud-cliffs described 
by Kotzebue; and also along the Lena, the Yenisei, and all the 
Northern rivers which have their embouchure into the Arctic 
Sea. The remains of these animals are no doubt spread 
out over a vast extent of the floor of what is now the 
North Sea, and the fishermen were in the habit of bringing 
to Yarmouth, together with the fish, the remains of the 
Mammoth which they had dredged up. 10 Mr. J. J. Owles, 
10 Mr. Samuel Woodward (Author of the ‘Geology of Norfolk,’ and 
father of the writer) records that no fewer than 2000 Elephant-grinders 
had been dredged up from the Oyster-bed off Happisburgh, Norfolk, by the 
fishermen between 1820 and 1888. See also Falconer’s ‘ Palaeontological 
Memoirs’; 1868, vol. ii., p. 204. 
