ntly,
and thus preserved by the antiseptic power of frost to this age? The
glaciers of the north may hold multitudes more of these and kindred
creatures, some of which may yet be disinterred, or thawed out, and may
lift yet more the curtain which so tantalisingly covers the conditions
of their life-history. These two huge Pachyderms are certainly extinct
now; yet their remains, scattered over so vast an area, are everywhere
associated with those of other animals which were indubitably
contemporary with them, and whose species-life is continued to our own
times. Some of these, as the great bear and the musk-ox of the sub-polar
regions, we know to be in the habit of migrating northward in spring,
and southward in autumn. That no lack of suitable food would be found,
even in such high latitudes, for browsing quadrupeds, appears from the
fact that, even beyond the parallel of 75 deg. north, large birch-trees are
found embedded in the cliffs, in abundance sufficient to be largely used
as common fuel, and still retaining their woody fibre, their bark,
branches, and roots. The climate then was not _greatly_ different from
what it is now, when the birch, as a tree, reaches to about 70 deg..

It is interesting to observe that both this elephant and this rhinoceros
were inhabitants of England also; and that at the same period as the
cavern bear, the hyena, the lion, and the machairode, the baboon, the
bison, and the urus, the Irish elk, and the extinct horse; at the same
time too, as the reindeer, the stag, the black bear, the wolf and fox,
the beaver, the wild cat, the hare, and rabbit, the otter and badger,
the wild hog, the rat and mouse, all our present shrews, the mole, the
stoat and polecat, the noctule and the horse-shoe bats. And curious it
is to note, as we go over this list, how some of the creatures
enumerated are long extinct everywhere, some have been long extinct in
England, but are still found elsewhere, some have more recently become
extinct here, but at different eras, some are nearly extinguished, and
some are yet abundant in different degrees.

I do not attach much importance to the traditions of the Siberians, that
the tusks and skeletons which they find belonged to a large
subterraneous animal, which could not bear the light; nor to those of
the Chinese, respecting a similar burrowing quadruped of prodigious
bulk, which they call, by a sort of irony, _tyn-schu_, or the mouse that
hides himself. The fables ma