Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 25.djvu/287

1869.] undertake to chronicle all the Pleistocene Mammals that have been found in Britain is a task that cannot be undertaken with any degree of satisfaction, because the new discoveries that are daily being made render its perfect completion impossible; but, nevertheless, I prefer to bring before the Society the results at which I have arrived at the present time, rather than to await the higher knowledge that possibly might have been acquired during the vicissitudesof another decade. In the only English text-book on the Fossil Mammals, the Preglacial Fauna is confused with the Post-glacial, and that again with the Prehistoric. There is not even a complete list in print of the species that compose any one of these three great groups of Mammals. The numerous undescribed species in Preglacial collections from the forest-bed of Norfolk and Suffolk render it impossible to give a complete list of the Mammalia of that formation, or to trace the precise relation that they bear to those of the Pliocenes of the south of Prance and Lombardy. The British Prehistoric Mammals have already been defined in the essay that is now being printed by the International Congress of Prehistoric Archæology. My present object is to define, as sharply as possible, the Postglacial Mammals from those of the preceding and succeeding epochs, to show their distribution in Britain, to prove the identity of the Cave-fauna with that of the Postglacial Riverbeds, and, lastly, to examine the evidence as to the climate of the epoch.

The term Postglacial is used as the exact equivalent of the Quaternary of Mr. Prestwich and the French savants, and the Postpliocene of Sir Charles Lyell, and is applied to that group of animals which have been proved, by the labours of Dr. Falconer, M. Lartet, and others to have inhabited France, Germany, and Britain after the Glacial period, and which most probably invaded the portions of the Preglacial continent that were not submerged while the great boulder-drift was falling from the melting icebergs that floated over the depressed area in northern Europe.

§ 2. Distribution of Postglacial Mammals throughout England and Wales.—All the cases that I have been able to collect of the occurrence of fossil mammals in the more ancient caves and in the high- and low-level gravels of England and Wales, are arranged in the following table in natural, and their localities in alphabetical, order. All doubtful species have been omitted. For the determination of the animals from the caves of Wales I am indebted in part to Mr. W. A. Sanford, F.G.S., and the late Dr. Falconer, F.R.S. ; for that of the Mammals of Brixham, to Prof, Busk, F.R.S., and for those of Salisbury to Dr. Blackmore, F.G.S.