ed on
to deal was a period in which God created the fowl that flieth above the
earth, with moving [or creeping] creatures, both in the waters and on
the land, and what our translation renders great whales, but that I find
rendered, in the margin, great sea monsters.

The Tertiary period had also its prominent class of existences. Its
flora seems to have been no more conspicuous than that of the present
time; its reptiles occupy a very subordinate place; but its beasts of
the field were by far the most wonderfully developed, both in size and
numbers, that ever appeared upon earth. Its mammoths and its mastodons,
its rhinoceri and its hippopotami, its enormous dinotherium and colossal
megatherium, greatly more than equalled in bulk the largest mammals of
the present time, and vastly exceeded them in number. The remains of one
of its elephants (_Elephas primigenius_) are still so abundant amid the
frozen wastes of Siberia, that what have been not inappropriately termed
"ivory quarries" have been wrought among their bones for more than a
hundred years. Even in our own country, of which, as I have already
shown, this elephant was for long ages a native, so abundant are the
skeletons and tusks, that there is scarcely a local museum in the
kingdom that has not its specimens, dug out of the Pleistocene deposits
of the neighborhood. And with this ancient elephant there were meetly
associated in Britain, as on the northern continents generally all
around the globe, many other mammals of corresponding magnitude. "Grand
indeed," says an English naturalist, "was the fauna of the British
islands in those early days. Tigers as large again as the biggest
Asiatic species lurked in the ancient thickets; elephants of nearly
twice the bulk of the largest individuals that now exist in Africa or
Ceylon roamed in herds; at least two species of rhinoceros forced their
way through the primeval forest; and the lakes and rivers were tenanted
by hippopotami as bulky, and with as great tusks, as those of Africa."
The massive cave-bear and large cave-hyaena belonged to the same
formidable group, with at least two species of great oxen (_Bos
longifrons_ and _Bos primigenius_), with a horse of smaller size, and an
elk (_Megaceros Hibernicus_) that stood ten feet four inches in height.
Truly this Tertiary age--this third and last of the great geologic
periods--was peculiarly the age of great "beasts of the earth after
their kind, and of cattle after th