Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/395

Rh enemies, than that they failed to bring about their speedy extinction.

It is already clear that Man was contemporary in Europe with two species of elephant, E. primigenius and E. antiquus, two, also, of rhinoceros, R. tichorhinus and R. hemitœcus (Falc.), at least one species of hippopotamus, the cave-bear, cave-lion, and cave-hyæna, various bovine, equine, and cervine animals now extinct, and many smaller carnivora, rodentia, and insectivora. While these were slowly passing away, the musk buffalo, reindeer, and other arctic species, which have survived to our times, were retreating northwards, from the valleys of the Thames and Seine, to their present more arctic haunts.

The human skeletons of the Belgian caverns of times coeval with the mammoth and other extinct mammalia, do not betray any signs of a marked departure in their structure, whether of skull or limb, from the modern standard of certain living races of the human family. As to the remarkable Neanderthal skeleton (Ch. V. p. 75), it is at present too isolated and exceptional, and its age too uncertain, to warrant us in relying on its abnormal and ape-like characters, as bearing on the question whether the farther back we trace Man into the past, the more we shall find him approach in bodily conformation to those species of the anthropoid quadrumana which are most akin to him in structure.

In the descriptions already given of the geographical changes which the British Isles have undergone since the commencement of the glacial period (as illustrated by several maps, pp. 276–279), it has been shown that there must have been a free communication by land between the Continent and these islands, and between the several islands themselves, within the Post-pliocene epoch, in order to account for the Germanic fauna and flora having migrated into every part of the area, as well as for the Scandinavian plants and animals