Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/522

494 in the twelfth century in the river Teivi. The wild boar disappeared from England before the reign of Charles the First, and lingered in the waste lands of Ireland into the next century. The reindeer was hunted by the jarls of Orkney in the remote north in Caithness as late as the year 1159, while Henry the Second occupied the throne of England, and Alexander Neckam was writing his history. The gradual disappearance of these animals marks the increase of population, the cutting down of forests, the drainage of morasses, the multiplication of roads, by which man became master of the whole of the British Isles.

It remains for us to sum up the principal results of our enquiry into Early Man in Britain. The succession of events from the beginning to the end of the Tertiary period has been treated; a succession in which each stage is intimately connected with that which went before and followed after. In the Eocene and Meiocene ages our islands formed part of a continent extending northwards to Iceland, Spitzbergen, and Greenland, with a warm climate and a luxuriant vegetation, inhabited by wild beasts belonging to extinct species. As none of the mammalia then alive are now living, it is unreasonable to suppose that man, the most highly specialised of all, should then have been on the earth. Nor is it likely