Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/183

] and the accumulation of shingle banks and of silt on the inner side of the curves, will satisfactorily account for the manner in which the deposits are distributed. The river would visit each part of the valley in succession, leaving behind its débris at the levels which it successively occupied.

The discovery of numerous fossil bones, teeth, and antlers in a bed of gravel by Captain Luard, R.E., in digging the foundations for the new cavalry barracks at Windsor, in 1867, afifords us the means of forming a striking picture of the valley of the Thames in the late Pleistocene age. On visiting the spot with him, I found that more than one half of the remains belonged to the reindeer, the rest to bisons, horses, wolves, and bears. They had evidently been swept down by the current from some point higher up the stream. In illustration of this accumulation a parallel case may be quoted from the observations of Admiral Von Wrangel, in Siberia. "The migrating body of reindeer," he writes, "consists of many thousands, and though they are divided into herds of two or three hundred each, yet the herds keep so near together, as to form only one immense mass, which is sometimes from fifty to a hundred wersts, or thirty to sixty miles, in breadth. They always follow the same route, and in crossing the river Aniuj, near Plobischtsche, they choose a place where a dry valley leads down to a stream on one side, and a flat sandy shore facilitates their landing on another. As each separate herd approaches the river, the deer draw more closely together, and the largest and strongest takes the