But in a still earlier
period, of which there exists unequivocal evidence in the buried forests
of Happisburgh and Cromer, the country had not only its head above
water, as now, but seems to have possessed oven more than its present
breadth of surface. During this ancient time,--more remote by many
centuries than not only the times of the old coast-line, but than even
those of the partial submergence of the island,--that northern mammoth
lived in great abundance, of which the remains have been found by
hundreds in England alone, together with the northern hippopotamus, and
at least two northern species of rhinoceros. And though they have all
ceased to exist, with their wild associates in the forests and jungles
of the Pleistocene, the cave-hyaena, the cave-tiger, and the cave-bear,
we know that the descendants of some of their feebler contemporaries,
such as the badger, the fox, the wild cat, and the red deer, still live
amid our hills and brakes. The trees, too, under which they roamed, and
whose remains we find buried in the same deposits as theirs, were of
species that still hold their place as aboriginal trees of the country,
or of at least the more northerly provinces of the continent. The common
Scotch fir, the common birch, and a continental species of conifer of
the far north, the Norwegian spruce (_Abies excelsa_), have been found
underlying the Pleistocene drift, and rooted in the mammiferous crag;
and for many ages must the old extinct elephant have roamed amid these
familiar trees. From one limited tract of sea bottom on the Norfolk
coast the fishermen engaged in dredging oysters brought ashore, in the
course of thirteen years (from 1820 to 1833), no fewer than two thousand
elephants' grinders, besides great tusks and numerous portions of
skeletons. It was calculated that these remains could not have belonged
to fewer than five hundred individual mammoths of English growth; and,
various in their states of keeping, and belonging to animals of which
only a few at a time could have found sufficient food in a limited tract
of country, the inference seems inevitable that they must have belonged,
not to one or two, but to many succeeding generations. The further fact,
that remains of this ancient elephant (_Elephas primigenius_) occur all
round the globe in a broad belt, extending from the fortieth to near the
seventieth degree of north latitude, leads to the same conclusion. It
must have required many ages ere an a