Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/244

226 When I showed the scales and teeth of the pike, perch, roach, and salmon, which I obtained from this formation, to Mr. Agassiz, he thought they varied so much from their nearest living representatives that they might rank as distinct species; but Mr. Yarrell doubted the propriety of so distinguishing them. The insects, like the shells and plants, are identical, so far as they are known, with living British species. No progress has yet been made at Mundesley in discovering the contemporary mammalia.

By referring to the description and section of the freshwater deposit at p. 159, the reader will at once perceive the striking analogy of the Mundesley and Hoxne deposits, the latter so productive of flint implements of the Amiens type. Both of them, like the Bedford gravel with flint tools and the bones of extinct mammalia (noticed at p. 164), are postglacial. It will also be seen that a long series of events, accompanied by changes in physical geography, intervened between the 'forest bed,' No. 3, fig. 27, p. 213, when the Elephas meridionalis flourished, and the period of the Mundesley fluviatile beds ; just as in France I have shown, p. 199, that the same E. meridionalis belonged to a system of drainage different from and anterior to that with which the flint implements of the old alluvium of the Somme and the Seine were connected.

Before the growth of the ancient forest, No. 3, fig. 33, the Mastodon arvernensis, a large proboscidian, characteristic of the Norwich crag, appears to have died out, or to have become scarce, as no remains of it have yet been found in the Norfolk cliffs. There was, no doubt, time for other modifications in the mammalian fauna between the era of the marine beds, No. 2, p. 213 (the shells of which imply permanent submergence beneath the sea), and the accumulation of the uppermost of the fluvio-marine, and lignite beds, No. 3', which overlie both Nos. 3 and 2, or the buried forest and the crag.