Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/184

156 lead. He advances, closely followed by a few of the others, with head erect, and apparently intent on examining the locality. When he has satisfied himself he enters the river, the rest of the herd crowd after him, and in a few minutes the surface is covered with them." Wolves, bears, and foxes hang upon the flanks and rear of these great migratory bodies, and prey upon the stragglers; and invariably many casualties occur at the fords, where the weak or wounded animal is swept away by the current. From these facts we may infer that a Palæolithic hunter, standing on one of the hills commanding a view of the district above Windsor in the winter time, would have seen vast herds of reindeer crossing the stream, and in the summer herds of horses and bisons availing themselves of the same fords, with wolves and bears in their train. We shall see, in the next chapter, that reindeer and bisons occupied the same districts of Derbyshire in different seasons of the year; and we may therefore conclude that the same thing happened in the valley of the Thames.

In other fluviatile deposits in the Thames valley the reindeer has been found in considerable abundance—at Kew, for example, in association with the bison, and in London with the lion, Irish elk, bison, urus, horse, woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, straight-tusked elephant, and hippopotamus.

The presence of man at this time in the valley of the Thames is proved by a series of discoveries dating from