en still adhering to
rocks raised to giddy elevations over the sea. The group of mammals,
however, which lived during this period, and to whose abundant tusks and
skeletons one of its older deposits (the mammaliferous crag) owes its
name, was marked by so peculiar a character, that evidence of a
universal deluge has been often sought for in their remains. The
group,--that which immediately preceded the animals of our own times,
and included not a few of the indigenous species which still inhabit our
country,--was chiefly remarkable for containing many genera, all of
whose existing species are exotic. It had its great elephant, its two
species of rhinoceros, its hippopotamus, its hyaena, its tiger, and its
monkey; and much ingenious calculation has been employed by writers such
as Granville Penn, in attempting to show how these remains might have
been transported from the intertropical regions during the Flood, not
only to Britain, but even to the northern wastes of Siberia,--a voyage
of from four to five thousand miles. There are instances on record in
which the bodies of the drowned have been drifted from ninety to a
hundred and fifty miles from the spot where they had been first
submerged; but they have always been found, in these cases, in a
condition of sad mutilation and decay; whereas the carcass of the
ancient elephant which was discovered, a little ere the commencement of
the present century, locked up in ice in Siberia, three thousand six
hundred miles from where elephants now live, was in such a state of
excellent keeping, that the bears and dogs fed upon its flesh. It seems
a significant circumstance too, that the remains of these fossil
elephants, tigers, and hyaenas, should be associated in even our own
country with those of well known northern species,--with the remains of
the reindeer, of the red deer, of the Lithuanian auroch, of the European
beaver, of the European wolf, of the wild cat, the fox, and the otter.
Writers, however, such as Mr. Penn, got over both difficulties. He
showed, for instance, how a ship had once run across the Atlantic under
bare poles, during an almost continued hurricane, at the rate of two
hundred and eighty-eight miles in twenty-four hours,--nearly the rate at
which the great American steamers cross the same ocean now; and why, he
asked, might not the carcasses of elephants have drifted northwards at
an equal rate on the tides of the deluge? And as for the mixed character
of th