, is rendered evident by their great
numbers in some localities, and from their occurrence in various states
of preservation, and in beds of various ages. The five hundred mammoths
whose tusks and grinders were dragged up in thirteen years by the oyster
dredgers of the Norfolk coast from a tract of submerged drift, could not
all have been contemporary in a small corner of England, but must have
represented several generations. And of course the two thousand
grinders brought up from the exposed surface of the drift must have
borne but a small proportion to the thousands still dispersed throughout
the entire depth of the deposit. Any argument, however, founded on the
mere numbers of these elephantine tusks and grinders, and which evaded
the important question of species, might be eluded, however unfairly, by
the assertors of a universal deluge. Floods certainly do at times
accumulate, in great heaps, bodies of the same specific gravity; and why
might not a universal flood have accumulated on this special tract of
drift, the carcasses of many elephants? But it will be found greatly
more difficult to elude the ingenious argument on the general question
of Professor Owen. Next, perhaps, to the extinct elephant, one of the
most numerous animals of this ancient group was the great Irish elk,
_Megaceros Hibernicus_, a creature that, measured to the top of its
enormous antlers, stood ten feet four inches in height, and exceeded in
bulk and size the largest horses. Like all other species of the deer
family, the creature annually shed and renewed its horns; "and a male
deer may be reckoned," says Professor Owen, "to have left about eight
pairs of antlers, besides its bones, to testify its former existence
upon the earth. But as the female has usually no antlers, our
expectations might be limited to the discovery of four times as many
pairs of antlers as skeletons in the superficial deposits of the
countries in which such deer have lived and died. The actual proportion
of the fossil antlers of the great extinct species of British Pliocene
deer (which antlers are proved by the form of their base to have been
shed by the living animals) to the fossil bones of the same species, is
somewhat greater than in the above calculation. Although, therefore, it
may be contended that the swollen carcass of a drowned exotic deer might
be borne along a diluvial wave to a considerable distance, and its
bones ultimately deposited far from its native s