Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 35.djvu/192

142 the Lancashire and Cheshire district; in Derbyshire, in a cleft of the Mountain Limestone at Dove Holes near Buxton (Binney); in a cave at Gelly Dale near Castleton (Pennington and myself); and in Staffordshire at Copenhall near Crewe, in a cutting of the London and North-western Railway (Sir P. Egerton). In all these cases the relation of the deposit in which the remains were found to the Boulder-clays is uncertain.

The Mammoth was considered by Dr. Falconer to be a member of the peculiar fauna of the Preglacial Forest-bed, because its remains were met with in the same mineral condition as the other Forest-bed Mammalia cast up by the sea at the foot of the Norfolk cliffs. In 1868 I saw reason to doubt this conclusion, and to believe that they were derived from the Postglacial gravels on the top of the cliffs, or from the late Pleistocene ossiferous deposit on the Dogger Bank. Since that time, however, I have been led, from the examination of specimens which Dr. Falconer never saw, and from a consideration of the associated fauna, to hold that his judgment in this case is probably correct. The objection that the animal may have been derived from newer deposits is met by the fact that the Forest-bed fauna contains no less than eighteen out of a total of twenty-six mammals which are proved to have been its contemporaries by discoveries in other places. The mammoth, as Dr. Falconer pointed out, was of an elastic constitution, so that its presence in a group of animals not now living in cold countries is not rendered improbable by its habits of life. The probability also is considerably strengthened by the fact of its being proved to have been an inhabitant of Britain before the Glacial period, from the above-mentioned discoveries in the south and west of England and in Scotland.

In the late Pleistocene deposits of Britain the mammoth is the most abundant animal, being found in eighty-two cases out of 148 localities tabulated in an essay brought before this Society in 1869, and very generally along with the reindeer. Some of the river-deposits, such as those of Hoxne and Bedford, are clearly of Postglacial age, in the sense of being after the layer of Boulder-clay, considered by Mr. Searles Wood the newer of the two clays. It has also been found in abundance in the lower brick-earths of the Thames valley, at Ilford, Erith, and Crayford, which probably belong to a period before the Glacial age. It is also, as has been shown in the preceding pages, Preglacial in Cheshire, Hertfordshire, and Norfolk, and probably also in Scotland. From these considerations it follows that, while the temperature was becoming sufficiently lowered to