k, and elm,
and ash covered great tracts, and the birch and fir clothed the hills;
but where the yew and the laurel grew side by side with the
custard-apple and the fan-palm, and the ground was overrun with trailers
of the gourd and melon kind, but where grasses were few and scarce, the
exquisite order _Rosaceae_, with its beautiful flowers and grateful
fruit, was rarely seen, and the aromatic _Labiatae_--the thyme, and mint,
and sage--were as yet unknown.

And the beasts that already tenanted this fair land were for bulk and
power worthy of the domain. The Dinothere and the Mastodon wallowed and
browsed where great London now crowds its princely palaces. Through the
greenwood shades of the forests of oak wandered hippopotamuses and
rhinoceroses of several kinds, the long-tusked mammoth, and two or three
species of horses. Two gigantic oxen--a bison and a urus--roamed over
the fir-clad hills of Scotland, and a curious flat-headed ox, of small
size and minute horns, made Ireland its peculiar home. That island, too,
was the metropolis of a colossal fallow-deer, whose remains, ticketed as
those of the Irish Elk, astonish us in our museums. It stood seven feet
in height at the withers, and waved its branching antlers, eleven feet
wide, twelve feet and upwards above the ground;[6] yet its magnificent
stature could not preserve it from a not infrequent fate, that of
becoming intombed in the deep bogs of its native isle. Britain had,
moreover, a stag of scarcely less gigantic proportions, with the
reindeer of the north, and the smaller kinds with which we are now
familiar.

All these herbivores, and numberless smaller genera, some now extinct,
some surviving, were kept in check by powerful predatory tyrants, for
whose representatives we must now look to the jungles of India or the
burning karroos of Southern Africa. The Lion and the Tiger stalked over
these isles, and a terrible tiger-like creature, the Machairode, of even
superior size and power to the scourge of the Bengal jungle, with curved
and saw-edged canine-teeth, hung upon the flanks of the cervine and
bovine herds, and sprang upon the fattest of them. Then, too, there was
a vast Bear, huger and mightier than the fearful grizzly bear of
America, which haunted caves, and prowling around forced down with its
horrid paws the shaggy bull, and broke his stout neck by main force, and
dragged the body home to devour at leisure. And many of these caves, the
holes and chasms