eros, like, but
not quite the same as, the African square-mouthed rhinoceros; and the
great Irish deer, which is like a giant fallow-deer. These three
animals are really extinct kinds or species, but are not very far from
living kinds. In fact, the most recent geological deposits do not
contain any animals so peculiar, when compared with living animals, as
to necessitate a wide separation of the fossil animal from living
"congeners" by the naturalist who classifies animals and tries to
exhibit their degrees of likeness and relationship to one another by
the names he adopts for them. The mammoth is a distinct "species" of
elephant. It requires, it is true, a "specific" or "second" name of
its own; but it belongs to the genus elephant. Hence we call it
_Elephas primigenius_, whilst the living Indian elephant is _Elephas
Indicus_. The reader is referred to the preceding chapter for further
notes about elephants.

The strata next below the Pleistocene gravels and cave deposits are
ascribed to the "Pliocene age"--older than these are the "Miocene" and
the "Eocene," and then you come to the Chalk, a good white landmark
separating newer from older strata.

We know now in great detail the skeletons and jaws of some hundreds of
kinds of extinct animals of very different groups found in the Eocene,
the Miocene, the Pliocene, and the Pleistocene layers of clays, sands,
and gravels of this part of the world. Nothing very strange or unlike
what is now living is found in the Pleistocene--the latest
deposits--but when we go further back strange creatures are
discovered, becoming stranger and less like living things as we pass
through Pliocene to Miocene, and on--downwards in layers, backwards in
time--to the Eocene.

Though the past history of the Mediterranean sea shows that it was
formerly not so extensive as it is now, and that there were junctions
between Europe and Africa across its waters, yet the deeper parts of
that sea are very ancient, and some of the islands have long been
isolated. In Malta the remains of extraordinary species of minute
elephants have been found, one no larger than a small donkey, and in
the island of Cyprus an English lady, Miss Dorothea Bate, has
discovered the bones of a pigmy hippopotamus (like that still living
in Liberia) no larger than a sheep. Miss Bate some three years ago
heard of the existence of a bone-containing deposit of Pleistocene age
in limestone caverns and fissures in the island of