Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/70

42 They have furnished the remains of a small hoglike animal, Hyopotamus bovinus of Owen, which is identified by Professor Gervais with that found in lower Meiocene strata in the Bourbonais. Crocodiles also have been met with, closely resembling those of the lower Meiocene strata of the Boulonnais and valley of the Allier. Among the plants Professor Heer recognises a form analogous to the mammoth tree of California, and three other species identical with those of the lignites of Bovey Tracey.

In the middle and upper Meiocene periods the southern area became lifted up above the waves, and the retreat of the British coast-line southwards towards the mainland of France, which had begun in the Eocene age, was completed by the greater part, if not the whole, of the English Channel becoming dry land.

We may infer, from the rarity of Meiocene deposits in Britain, and from their being, with the above exception, mere freshwater local accumulations, that the mainland of Europe extended northwards, so as to include the British area throughout the middle and later stages of the Meiocene period. The south-eastern sea of the Eocene age (Fig. 3), described in the last chapter, was reduced in the early Meiocene age to two isolated basins, of which one covered the Isle of Wight and the adjacent regions, the southern sea of Fig. 6; while the other extended over Holland and Belgium, but did not come far enough to the west to touch the present coast-line, although its proximity may be inferred from the rolled fragments of Meiocene fossils found in the Pleiocene