Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/267

Rh Beds, or the caves of Montmartre. On these cliffs, too, is scored the history of the past. Here lie the little Nuculæ, still crimson and pink as when they first settled down through the water into their bed of sand; and teeth of dichodons still bright with enamel. The struggle of life raged as fiercely then as now. And the pierced skull of the palæothere still tells where it received its death-wound from its foe the crocodile.

But other things do they reveal. They plainly show, as was, I believe, first suggested by Mr. Searles Wood, that in the Middle-Eocene period Europe and America were connected. The pachyderms of Hordle are allied to the tapirs of the New World. The same alligators still swim in the warm rivers of Florida: and the same type of sauroid fish, whose scales spangle the Freshwater Beds, is now only found in the West. 249