Part 29

There also occur, in certain places, along with bones of rhinoceroses, and other quadrupeds of this period, those of a deer so much resembling the reindeer, that it would be difficult to assign distinctive characters to it; a circumstance which is so much the more extraordinary, that the reindeer is at the present day confined to the coldest regions of the north, while the whole genus of rhinoceroses belongs to the torrid zone.

There exist in the strata of which we speak, remains of a species very similar to the fallow-deer, but a third larger, and prodigious quantities of horns, very much resembling those of our present stag, as well as bones, very like those of the aurochs and domestic ox, two very distinct species, which had been erroneously confounded by the naturalists who preceded us. The entire heads, however, resembling those of these two animals, as well as that of the musk-ox of Canada, which have often been extracted from the earth, do not come from localities sufficiently well determined to enable us to assert that these species had been contemporaries of the great pachydermata, of which we have made mention above.

The osseous brecciæ of the shores of the Mediterranean have also afforded two species of Lagomys, animals, the genus of which exists at the present day only in Siberia; two species of rabbits, lemmings, and rats of the size of the water-rat and domestic mouse. In the caves of England two species are also found.

The osseous brecciæ even contain bones of shrew-mice and lizards.

In certain sandy strata of Tuscany, there are teeth of a porcupine, and in those of Russia heads of a species of beaver, larger than ours, which M. Fischer has named Trogontherium.

But it is more particularly in the class Edentata that these races of animals belonging to the period before the last assume a size much superior to that of their present congeners, and even rise to a magnitude altogether gigantic.

The Megatherium unites a part of the generic characters of the armadilloes, with some of those of the sloths, and is in size equal to the largest rhinoceros. Its claws must have been of a monstrous length, and prodigious strength; its whole skeleton possesses an excessive solidity. It has only as yet been found in the sandy strata of North America.

The Megalonyx has been very similar to it in its characters, but has been somewhat less; its claws much longer and sharper in the edges. Some bones and entire toes of it have been found in certain caves in Virginia, and in an island on the coast of Georgia.

These two enormous edentata have only hitherto presented their remains in America; but Europe possesses one of the same class which does not yield to them in magnitude. It is only known by a single terminal joint of a toe, but this fragment is sufficient to assure us that it was very similar to a pangolin or manis, but to a pangolin of nearly twenty-four feet in length. It lived in the same districts as the elephants, rhinoceroses, and gigantic tapirs; for its bones have been found along with theirs in a sandy deposit in the county of Darmstadt, not far from the Rhine.

The osseous brecciæ also contain, but very rarely, bones of carnivora, which are much more numerous in caverns, that is to say, in cavities wider and more complicated than the fissures or veins containing osseous brecciæ. The Jura chain in particular, is celebrated for them in the part of it which extends into Germany, where, for ages past, incredible quantities have been removed and destroyed, on account of certain medical virtues which had been attributed to them, and yet there still remains enough to fill the mind with astonishment. The principal part of these remains consists of bones of a very large species of bear (Ursus spelæus), which is characterised by a more prominent forehead than that of any of our living bears. Along with these bones are found those of two other species of bear (U. arctoideus and U. priscus); those of a hyena (H. fossilis), allied to the spotted hyena of the Cape, but differing from it in the form of its teeth and head; those of two tigers or panthers, of a wolf, a fox, a glutton, as well as of weasels, viverræ, and other small carnivora.

Here, also, may be observed that singular association of animals, the species resembling which live at the present day in climates so widely separated from each other as the Cape, the country of the spotted hyena, and Lapland, the country of our present gluttons. In like manner we have seen in a cave in France, a rhinoceros and a reindeer by the side of each other.

Bears are of rare occurrence in alluvial strata. Remains of the large species of the caves (U. spelæus), are said, however, to have been found in Austria and Hainaut; and in Tuscany there are bones of a particular species, remarkable for its compressed canine teeth (U. cultridens). The hyenas are more frequently met with. We have remains of them in France, found along with bones of elephants and rhinoceroses. A cave has lately been discovered in England, which contained prodigious quantities of them, where they were found of every age, and of which the soil presented even their excrements in a sufficient state of preservation to be easily recognised. It would appear that they had long lived there, and that it had been by them that the bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, horses, oxen, deer, and various animals of the class of glires, which are found along with them, and which bear evident marks of their teeth, had been dragged into the cave. But what must have been the soil of England, when these enormous animals lived upon it, and constituted the prey of ferocious beasts! These caves contain also bones of tigers, wolves and foxes; but the remains of bears are of excessively rare occurrence in them.

However this may be, we see that, at the epoch of the animal population which we are now passing under review, the class of carnivora was numerous and powerful. It reckoned three bears with round canine teeth, one with compressed canini, a large tiger or lion, another feline animal, of the size of the panther, a hyena, a wolf, a fox, a glutton, a martin or pole-cat, and a weasel.

The class of glires, composed in general of weak and small species, has been little observed by the collectors of fossil remains; and, in all cases, where the bones of these animals have been found in the strata or deposits of which we speak, they also have presented unknown species. Such, in particular, is a species of Lagomys found in the osseous brecciæ of Corsica and Sardinia, somewhat resembling the Lagomys alpinus of the high mountains of Siberia: so true is it that it is not always in the torrid zone only, that we are to seek for the animals which resemble those of this period.

These are the principal animals, the remains of which have been found in that mass of earth, sand, and mud,--that Diluvium, which everywhere covers our large plains, fills our caverns, and chokes up the fissures in many of our rocks. They incontestibly formed the population of the continents, at the epoch of the great catastrophe which has destroyed their races, and which has prepared the soil, on which the animals of the present day subsist.

Whatever resemblance certain of these species bear to those of our days, it cannot be disputed that the general mass of this population had a very different character, and that the greater part of the races which composed it have been utterly destroyed.

What astonishes us is, that, among all these mammifera, the greater number of which have their congeners at the present day in the warm parts of the globe, there has not been a single quadrumanous animal,--that there has not been collected a single bone or a single tooth of an ape or monkey, not so much even as a bone or a tooth belonging to an extinct species of these animals.

Nor is there any trace of man. All the bones of our species that have been found along with those of which we have been speaking, have occurred accidentally, and their number besides is exceedingly small, which assuredly would not have been the case, if men had then been settled in the countries which these animals inhabited.

Where, then, was the human race at this period? Did the last and most perfect of the works of the Creator nowhere exist? Did the animals which now accompany him upon the globe, and of which there are no traces among these fossil remains, surround him? Were the countries in which he lived with them swallowed up, when those which he now inhabits, and whose former population may have been destroyed by a great inundation, were laid dry again? These are questions which the study of fossil remains does not enable us to solve, and in this discourse we must not apply for information to other sources.

This much is certain, that we are now at least in the midst of a fourth succession of land animals,--that, after the age of reptiles, the age of palæotheria, the age of mammoths, and that of mastodons and megatheria, has come the age in which the human species, aided by some domestic animals, peaceably governs and fertilizes the earth, and that it is only in the deposits formed since the commencement of this age, in alluvial matters, peat-bogs, and recent concretions, that bones are found in the fossil state, which belong all of them to known and still living animals.

Such are the human skeletons of Guadaloupe, imbedded in a species of travertine formed of land shells, slate, and fragments of shells and madrepores of the neighbouring sea; the bones of oxen, deer, roes, and beavers, common in peat-bogs, and all the bones of men and domestic animals found in the mud and sand deposited by rivers, in burying grounds, and upon ancient fields of battle.

None of these remains belong either to the great deposit formed at the time of the last catastrophe, nor to those of preceding ages.

APPENDIX.

APPENDIX.

On the birds to which the name of Ibis was given by the ancient Egyptians.

Every body has heard of the Ibis, a bird to which the ancient Egyptians rendered a religious homage; which they reared within the precincts of their temples; allowed to wander unmolested through their towns; whose murderer, even although he had involuntarily become so, was punished with death; which they embalmed with as much care as their parents;--a bird to which they attributed a virgin purity; an inviolable attachment to their country, of which it was the emblem, an attachment so great that it suffered itself to die of hunger when it was transported elsewhere;--a bird which possessed instinct enough to know the increase and waning of the moon, and to regulate accordingly the quantity of its daily food, and the development of its young; which arrested at the frontiers of Egypt the serpents which would otherwise have carried destruction into that sacred land, and which inspired them with such terror that they dreaded its very feathers;--a bird, in fine, whose form the gods would have assumed, had they been forced to adopt a mortal figure, and into which Mercury was really transformed, when he had a mind to traverse the earth, and instruct men in the sciences and arts.

No other animal could have been so easy to recognize as this; for there is no other of which the ancients have left us at once, as of the ibis, excellent descriptions, accurate and even coloured figures, and the body itself preserved with its feathers, under the triple envelope of a preservative bitumen, thick and close folds of linen, and solid and well varnished vases. And yet, of all the modern authors who have spoken of the ibis, there is but one, the celebrated Bruce, a traveller more famous for his courage than for the justness of his opinions in natural history, who has not blundered respecting the true species of this bird; and his ideas with regard to this subject, however accurate they were, have not even been adopted by naturalists.

After several changes of opinion respecting the ibis, it was seemingly agreed, at the period when I published the first edition of this work, to give the name of Ibis to a bird a native of Africa, almost of the size of the stork, with white plumage, having the quills black, perched upon long red legs, armed with a long arched beak, of a pale yellow colour, sharp at its edges, rounded at its base, and notched at its point, and whose face is covered with a red skin destitute of feathers, which do not extend farther forward than the eyes.