Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/394

374 climate of those Post-pliocene ages, when Man was a denizen of the north-west of France and of southern and central England, appears to have been much more severe in winter than it is now in the same region, though far less cold than in the glacial period which immediately preceded. We may presume that the time demanded for the gradual dying out or extirpation of a large number of wild beasts which figure in the Post-pliocene strata, and are missing in the Recent fauna, was of protracted duration, for we know how tedious a task it is in our own times, even with the aid of fire-arms, to exterminate a noxious quadruped, a wolf, for example, in any region comprising within it an extensive forest or a mountain chain. In many villages in the north of Bengal, the tiger still occasionally carries off its human victims, and the abandonment of late years by the natives of a part of the Sunderbunds or lower delta of the Granges, which they once peopled, is attributed chiefly to the ravages of the tiger. It is probable that causes more general and powerful than the agency of Man, alterations in climate, variations in the range of many species of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, and of plants, geographical changes in the height, depth, and extent of land and sea, some or all of these combined, have given rise, in a vast series of years, to the annihilation, not only of many large mammalia, but to the disappearance of the Cyrena fluminalis, once common in the rivers of Europe, and to the different range or relative abundance of other shells which we find in the European drifts.

That the growing power of Man may have lent its aid as the destroying cause of many Post-pliocene species, must, however, be granted; yet, before the introduction of fire-arms, or even the use of improved weapons of stone, it seems more wonderful that the aborigines were able to hold their own against the cave-lion, hyæna, and wild bull, and to cope with such