Page:The history of Little England beyond Wales and the non-Kymric colony settled in Pembrokeshire.pdf/35

Rh nucula pygmæa, tellina calcarea, mya truncata, and saxicava nigosa. All of these species still flourish in the northern waters of Europe.

To return to our Pembrokeshire mammoths. The great majority of their bones belong to calves and these generally very young, some fœtal, which proves they bred near the caves, for young bones of the other mammals are decidedly scarce; so we must suppose that while the mammoth cows dropped their young on the rugged hills lying between the glacier of Precelly and the low lands, the other beasts preferred for breeding purposes the jungly swamps now covered by the waters of the Bristol Channel, and as this district was a long way from the caves, when a young beast was devoured by a carnivore, his bones were left on the surface and so perished.

We know the habits and appearance of the woolly rhinoceros (R. tichorinus), as well as his neighbour the mammoth, for the rhinoceros has been preserved in ice after the same fashion. He is known as tichorinus because his nostrils are divided by a bony ndge; he was a sturdy brute, and to a certain extent resembled the common white rhinoceros (R. simus) of Southern Africa. Like the latter, his skin lacked the folds which are so remarkable in the Asiatic rhinoceros. He had, moreover, two horns; one of these (probably the first or nasal horn) is in the Natural History Museum at Moscow, and measures nearly three feet in length. There was, however, one striking difference between the rhinoceros which formerly wandered over our land and that which still exists in Southern Africa. The British beast was covered with a thick woolly coat composed of short hair of a cinereous grey colour, from one to three inches long, with here and there a black hair longer and stiffer. "So much hair as grew from the parts of the frozen rhinoceros, observed by Pallas, he never observed on any other living species." It is supposed that the mammoth fed on the twigs of larch and other trees. That the woolly rhinoceros did so to a certain extent there can be no doubt, for in 1846, Professor Brandt, of St. Petersburg, was "so fortunate as to extract from cavities in the molar teeth of the Wiljni rhinoceros a small quantity of its half chewed food, among which fragments of pine leaves, one-half of the seed of a polygonaccous plant, and very minute portions of wood with porous cells (or fragments of coniferous wood) were still recognizable." The Pembrokeshire rhinocerous either migrated somewhere else during the breeding season, or as I have suggested above, bred at some considerable distance from the caves.

The reindeer (cervus tarandus) so far as we can learn from its bones, the extinct reindeer of Pembrokeshire, was identical with the Lapland deer of to-day. In the pleistocene days it ranged through Southern Europe, and in prehistoric times still lingered on in Scotland. The elk (cervus alces) is indistinguishable from the existing species. The mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, reindeer, and elk were northern types; but as they ranged in company from the north of Asia, so far south as the Alps and Pyrenees, must have been able to endure a considerable variation of temperature. There were, however, pleistocene mammals which were even more essentially northern: the musk ox (ovibos moschatus), the lemming (myodes lemmus), the tailless hare (lagmyos), the marmot (arctomys spermophilus), and the Arctic fox (canis lagopus). These are found in many of the ossiferous caves in England, but are missing in Pembrokeshire. Is this merely an accident, or dees it prove that our caverns were stored during the comparatively warm period that suceeded the glacial winter?

The beasts adapted to thrive in a temperate climate are very numerous: wolf (canis