Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/177

] mammoths found in Holyhead Harbour, off Torquay, off the coast of Sussex, and in the North Sea. On the Dogger Bank the accumulation of bones, teeth, and antlers is so great that Mr. J. J. Owles, of Yarmouth, collected more than 300 specimens from the fishermen, who casually bring them up in their nets and dredges. They belong to the bear, wolf, spotted hyæna, Irish elk, reindeer, stag, urus, bison, horse, woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, and beaver, and are to be viewed as the remains of animals living in the district at that time, and deposited by a river current, great with small, as in the case of similar accumulations on the land. Had they been deposited by the sea they would have been sifted by the action of the waves, and the smaller would have been heaped together in one place, and the larger in another. The dead carcases had evidently been collected in the eddies of a river that helped to form the Dogger Bank, which rises to within eight fathoms of the sea-level. Other testimony as to the former elevation of the British area is afforded by the discovery of a freshwater mussel (Unio pictorum) at a depth of 50 to 100 fathoms, recorded by Mr. Godwin Austen, in the English Channel, not very far from the point in the map where the river (see Fig. 32) entered the Atlantic. From this point the 100-fathom line passes southwards to the coast of Spain, and northwards far away to the west of Ireland, turning eastward, north of the Orkneys, in the direction of Norway, and dividing the gently undulating surface of the plateau now submerged on the east from the depths of the Atlantic on the west. This we may