Part 42

Before describing the three orders of events which occurred in the Quaternary epoch, we shall present a brief sketch of the organic kingdoms of Nature, namely, of the animals and vegetables which flourished at this date, and the new formations which arose. Lyell, and some other geologists, designate this the POST-TERTIARY EPOCH, which they divide into two subordinate groups.--1. The Post-Pliocene Period; 2. The Recent or Pleistocene Period.

POST-PLIOCENE PERIOD.

In the days of Cuvier the Tertiary formations were considered as a mere chaos of superficial deposits, having no distinct relations to each other. It was reserved for the English geologists, with Sir Charles Lyell at their head, to throw light upon this obscure page of the earth’s history; from the study of fossils, science has not only re-animated the animals, it has re-constructed the theatre of their existence. We see the British Islands now a straggling archipelago, and then the mouth of a vast river, of which the continent is lost; for, says Professor Ramsay, “We are not of necessity to consider Great Britain as having always been an island; it is an accident that it is an island now, and it has been an island many times before.” In the Tertiary epoch we see it surrounded, then, by shallow seas swarming with numerous forms of animal life; islands covered with bushy Palms; banks on which Turtles basked in the sun; vast basins of fresh or brackish water, in which the tide made itself felt, and which abounded with various species of sharks; rivers in which Crocodiles increased and multiplied; woods which sheltered numerous Mammals and some Serpents of large size; fresh-water lakes which received the spoils of numerous shells. Dry land had increased immensely. Groups of ancient isles we have seen united and become continents, with lakes, bays, and perhaps inland seas. Gigantic Elephants, vastly larger than any now existing, close the epoch, and probably usher in the succeeding one; for we are not to suppose any sudden break to distinguish one period from another in Nature, although it is convenient to arrange them so for the purposes of description. If we may judge from their remains, these animals must have existed in great numbers, for it is stated that on the coast of Norfolk alone the fishermen, in trawling for oysters, dredged up between 1820 and 1833, no less than 2,000 molar teeth of Elephants. If we consider how slowly these animals multiply, these quarries of ivory, as we may call them, must have required many centuries for their production and accumulation.

The same lakes and rivers were at this time occupied, also, by the Hippopotamus, as large and as formidably armed as that now inhabiting the African solitudes; also the two-horned Rhinoceros; and three species of Bos, one of which was hairy and bore a mane. Some Deer of gigantic size, as compared with living species, bounded over the plains. In the same savannahs lived the Reindeer, the Stag, a Horse of small size, the Ass, the Bear, and the Roe, for Mammals had succeeded the Ichthyosauri of a former age. Nevertheless, the epoch had its tyrants also. A Lion, as large as the largest of the Lions of Africa, hunted its prey in the British jungles. Another animal of the feline race, the Machairodus (Fig. 179), was probably the most ferocious and destructive of Carnivora; bands of Hyænas and a terrible Bear, surpassing in size that of the Rocky Mountains, had established themselves in the caverns; two species of Beaver made their appearance on the scene.

The finding of the remains of most of these animals in caverns was perhaps among the most interesting discoveries of geology. The discovery was first made in the celebrated Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire, which has been described by Dr. Buckland; and afterwards at Kent’s Hole, near Torquay. This latter pleasant Devonshire town is built in a creek, shut out from exposure on all sides except the south. In this creek, hollowed out of the rocks, is the great fissure or cavern known as Kent’s Hole; like that of Kirkdale, it has been under water, from whence, after a longer or shorter interval, it emerged, but remained entirely closed till the moment when chance led to its discovery. The principal cavern is 600 feet in length, with many crevices or fissures of smaller extent traversing the rock in various directions. A bed of hard stalagmite of very ancient formation, which has been again covered with a thin layer of soil, forms the floor of the cavern, which is a red sandy clay. From this bed of red loam or clay was disinterred a mass of fossil bones belonging to extinct species of Bear, Lion, Rhinoceros, Reindeer, Beaver, and Hyæna.

Such an assemblage gave rise to all sorts of conjectures. It was generally thought that the dwelling of some beasts of prey had been discovered, which had dragged the carcases of elephants, deer, and others into these caves, to devour them at leisure. Others asked if, in some cases, instinct did not impel sick animals, or animals broken down by old age, to seek such places for the purpose of dying in quiet; while others, again, suggested that these bones might have been engulfed pell-mell in the hole during some ancient inundation. However that may be, the remains discovered in these caves show that all these Mammals existed at the close of the Tertiary epoch, and that they all lived in England. What were the causes which led to their extinction?

It was the opinion of Cuvier and the early geologists that the ancient species were destroyed in some great and sudden catastrophe, from which none made their escape. But recent geologists trace their extinction to slow, successive, and determinative action due to local causes, the chief one being the gradual lowering of the temperature. We have seen that at the beginning of the Tertiary epoch, in the older Eocene age, palms, cocoa-nuts, and acacias, resembling those now met with in countries more favoured by the sun, grew in our island. The Miocene flora presents indications of a climate still warm, but less tropical; and the Pliocene period, which follows, contains remains which announce an approach to our present climate. In following the vegetable productions of the Tertiary epoch, the botanist meets with the floras of Africa, South America, and Australia, and finally settles in the flora of temperate Europe. Many circumstances demonstrate this decreasing temperature, until we arrive at what geologists call the glacial period--one of the winters of the ancient world.

But before entering on the evidences which exist of the glacial era we shall glance at the picture presented by the animals of the period; the vegetable products we need not dwell on--it is, in fact, that of our own era, the flora of temperate regions in our own epoch. The same remark would apply to the animals, but for some signal exceptions. In this epoch Man appears, and some of the Mammals of the last epoch, but of larger dimensions, have long disappeared. The more remarkable of these extinct animals we shall describe, as we have those belonging to anterior ages. They are not numerous; those of our hemisphere being the Mammoth, Elephas primigenius; the Bear, Ursus spelæus; gigantic Lion, Felis spelæa; Hyæna, Hyæna spelæa; Ox, Bison priscus, Bos primigenius; the gigantic Stag, Cervus megaceros; to which we may add the Dinornis and Epiornis, among birds. In America there existed in the Quaternary epoch some Edentates of colossal dimensions and of very peculiar structure, these were Megatherium, Megalonyx, and Mylodon; we shall pass these animals in review, beginning with those of our own hemisphere.

The Mammoth, the skeleton of which is represented in Fig. 180, surpassed the largest existing Elephants of the tropics in size, for it was from sixteen to eighteen feet in height. The teeth, and the size of the monstrous tusks, much curved, and with a spiral turn outwards, and which were from ten to fifteen feet in length, serve to distinguish the Mammoth from the two Elephants living at the present day, the African and the Indian. The form of its teeth permits of its being distinguished from its ally, the Mastodon; for while the teeth of the latter have rough mammillations on their surface, those of the Mammoth, like those of the living Indian Elephant, have a broad united surface, with regular furrowed lines of large curvature. The teeth of the Mammoth are four in number, like the Elephants, two in each jaw when the animal is adult, its head is elongated, its forehead concave, its jaws curved and truncated in front. It has been an easy task, as we shall see, to recognise the general form and structure of the Mammoth, even to its skin. We know beyond a doubt that it was thickly covered with long shaggy hair, and that a copious mane floated upon its neck and along its back; its trunk resembled that of the Indian Elephant; its body was heavy, with a tail naked to the end, which was covered with thick tufty hair, and its legs were comparatively shorter than those of the latter animal, many of the habits of which it nevertheless possessed. Blumenbach gave it the specific name of Elephas primigenius.

In all ages, and in almost all countries, chance discoveries have been made of fossil bones of elephants in the soil. Pliny has transmitted to us a tradition, recorded by the historian Theophrastus, who wrote 320 years before Jesus Christ, of the existence of bones of fossil ivory in the soil of Greece, that the bones were sometimes transformed into stones. “These bones,” the historian gravely tells us, “were both black and white, and born of the earth.” Some of the elephant’s bones having a slight resemblance to those of man, they have often been mistaken for human bones. In the earlier historic times these great bones, accidentally disinterred, have passed as having belonged to some hero or demigod; at a later period they were thought to be the bones of giants. We have already spoken of the mistake made by the Greeks in taking the patella of a fossil elephant for the knee-bone of Ajax; in the same manner the bones revealed by an earthquake, and attributed by Pliny to a giant, belonged, no doubt, to a fossil elephant. To a similar origin we may assign the pretended body of Orestes, thirteen feet in length, which was discovered at Tegea by the Spartans; those of Asterius, the son of Ajax, discovered in the Isle of Ladea, of ten cubits in length (about eighteen feet), according to Pausanius; finally, such were the great bones found in the Isle of Rhodes, of which Phlegon of Tralles speaks in his “Mundus Subterraneus.”

We might fill volumes with the history of the remains of pretended giants found in ancient tombs. The books, in fact, which exist, formed a voluminous literature in the middle ages--entitled Gigantology. All the facts, more or less real, true or imaginative, may be explained by the accidental discovery of the bones of some of these gigantic animals. We find in works on Gigantology, the history of a pretended giant, discovered in the 4th century, at Trapani in Sicily, of which Boccaccio speaks, and which may be taken for Polyphemus; of another, found in the 16th century, according to Fasellus, near Palermo; others, according to the same author, at Melilli between Leontium and Syracuse, Calatrasi and Petralia, at each of which places the bones of supposed giants were disinterred. P. Kircher speaks of three other giants being found in Sicily, of which only the teeth remained perfect.

In 1577, a storm having uprooted an oak near the cloisters of Reyden, in the Canton of Lucerne, in Switzerland, some large bones were exposed to view. Seven years after, the celebrated physician and Professor at Basle, Felix Pläten, being at Lucerne, examined these bones, and declared they could only be those of a giant. The Council of Lucerne consented to send the bones to Basle for more minute examination, and Pläten thought himself justified in attributing to the giant a height of nineteen feet. He designed a human skeleton on this scale, and returned the bones with the drawing to Lucerne. In 1706 there only remained of these bones a portion of the scapula and a fragment of the wrist bone; the anatomist Blumenbach, who saw them at the beginning of the century, easily recognised in them the bones of an Elephant. Let us not omit to add, as a complement to this story, that since the sixteenth century, the inhabitants of Lucerne have adopted the image of this fabulous giant as the supporter of the city arms.

Spanish history preserves many stories of giants. The supposed tooth of St. Christopher, shown at Valence, in the church dedicated to the saint, was certainly the molar tooth of a fossil Elephant; and in 1789, the canons of St. Vincent carried through the streets in public procession, to procure rain, the pretended arm of a saint, which was nothing more than the femur of an Elephant.

In France, in the reign of Charles VII. (1456), some of these bones of imaginary giants appeared in the bed of the Rhône. A repetition of the phenomenon occurred near Saint-Peirat, opposite Valence, when the Dauphin, afterwards Louis XI., then residing at the latter place, caused the bones to be gathered together and sent to Bourges, where they long remained objects of public curiosity in the interior of the Sainte-Chapelle. In 1564 a similar discovery took place in the same neighbourhood. Two peasants observed on the banks of the Rhône, along a slope, some great bones sticking out of the ground. They carried them to the neighbouring village, where they were examined by Cassanion, who lived at Valence. It was no doubt apropos to this that Cassanion wrote his treatise “De Gigantibus.” The description given by the author of a tooth sufficed, according to Cuvier, to prove that it belonged to an Elephant; it was a foot in length, and weighed eight pounds. It was also on the banks of the Rhône, but in Dauphiny, as we have seen, that the skeleton of the famous Teutobocchus, of which we have spoken in a previous chapter, was found.

In 1663 Otto de Guericke, the illustrious inventor of the air-pump, witnessed the discovery of the bones of an Elephant, buried in the shelly limestone, or Muschelkalk. Along with it were found its enormous tusks, which should have sufficed to establish its zoological origin. Nevertheless they were taken for horns, and the illustrious Leibnitz composed, out of the remains, a strange animal, carrying a horn in the middle of its forehead, and in each jaw a dozen molar teeth a foot long. Having fabricated this fantastic animal, Leibnitz named it also--he called it the fossil unicorn. In his “Protogæa,” a work remarkable besides as the first attempt at a theory of the earth, Leibnitz gave the description and a drawing of this imaginary animal. During more than thirty years the unicorn of Leibnitz was universally accepted throughout Germany; and nothing less than the discovery of the entire skeleton of the Mammoth in the valley of the Unstrut was required to produce a change of opinion. This skeleton was at once recognised by Tinzel, librarian to the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, as that of an Elephant, and was established as such; not, however, without a keen controversy with adversaries of all kinds.

In 1700 a soldier of Würtemberg accidentally observed some bones showing themselves projecting out of the earth, in an argillaceous soil, near the city of Canstadt, not far from the banks of the Necker. Having addressed a report to the reigning Duke, the latter caused the place to be excavated, which occupied nearly six months. A veritable cemetery of elephants was discovered, in which were not less than sixty tusks. Those which were entire were preserved; the fragments were abandoned to the court physician, and they became a mere vulgar medicine. In the last century the fossil bones of bears, which were abundant in Germany, were administered in that country medicinally, as an absorbent, astringent, and sudorific. It was then called by the German doctors the Ebur fossile, or Unicornu fossile, Licorn fossil. The magnificent tusks of the Mammoth found at Canstadt helped to combat fever and colic. What an intelligent man this court physician of Würtemberg must have been!

Numerous discoveries like those we have quoted distinguished the 18th century; but the progress of science has now rendered such mistakes as we have had to relate impossible. These bones were at length universally recognised as belonging to an Elephant, but erudition now intervened, and helped to obscure a subject which was otherwise perfectly clear. Some learned pedant declared that the bones found in Italy and France were the remains of the Elephants which Hannibal brought from Carthage with the army in his expedition against the Romans. The part of France where the most ancient bones of these Elephants were found is in the environs of the Rhône, and consequently on the route of the Carthaginian general, and this consideration appeared to these terrible savants to be a particularly triumphant answer to the naturalist’s reasoning. Again, at a later period, Domitius Ænobarbus conducted the Carthaginian armies, which were followed by a number of Elephants, armed for war. Cuvier scarcely took the trouble to refute this insignificant objection. It is merely necessary to read, in his learned dissertation, of the number of elephants which could remain to Hannibal when he had entered Gaul.

But the best reply that can be made to this strange objection raised by the learned, is to show how extensively these fossil bones of Elephants are scattered, not in Europe only, but over the world--there are few regions of the globe in which their remains are not found. In the north of Europe, in Scandinavia, in Ireland, in Belgium, in Germany, in Central Europe, in Poland, in Middle Russia, in South Russia, in Greece, in Italy, in Africa, in Asia, and, as we have seen, in England. In the New World remains of the Mammoth are also met with. What is most singular is that these remains exist more especially in great numbers in the north of Europe, in the frozen regions of Siberia--regions altogether uninhabitable for the Elephant in our days. “There is not,” says Pallas, “in all Asiatic Russia, from the Don to the extremity of the promontory of Tchutchis, a stream or river, especially of those which flow in the plains, on the banks of which some bones of Elephants and other animals foreign to the climate have not been found. But in the more elevated regions, the primitive and schistose chains, they are wanting, as are marine petrifactions. But in the lower slopes and in the great muddy and sandy plains, above all, in places which are swept by rivers and brooks, they are always found, which proves that we should not the less find them throughout the whole extent of the country if we had the same means of searching for them.”

Every year in the season when thaw takes place, the vast rivers which descend to the Frozen Ocean in the north of Siberia sweep down with their waters numerous portions of the banks, and expose to view bones buried in the soil and in the excavations left by the rushing waters. Cuvier gives a long list of places in Russia in which interesting discoveries have been made of Elephants’ bones; and it is certainly curious that the more we advance towards the north in Russia the more numerous and extensive do the bone depositories become. In spite of the oft-repeated and undoubted testimony of numerous travellers, we can scarcely credit the statements made respecting some of the islands of the glacial sea near the poles, situated opposite the mouth of the Lena and of the Indighirka. Here, for example, is an extract from “Billing’s Voyage” concerning these isles: “The whole island (which is about thirty-three leagues in length), except three or four small rocky mountains, is a mixture of ice and sand; and as the shores fall, from the heat of the sun’s thawing them, the tusks and bones of the mammont are found in great abundance. To use Chvoinoff’s own expression, the island is formed of the bones of this extraordinary animal, mixed with the horns and heads of the buffalo, or something like it, and some horns of the rhinoceros.”

New Siberia and the Lächow Islands off the mouth of the river Lena, are, for the most part, only an agglomeration of sand, ice, and Elephants’ teeth. At every tempest the sea casts ashore new quantities of mammoths’ tusks, and the inhabitants of Siberia carry on a profitable commerce in this fossil ivory. Every year, during the summer, innumerable fishermen’s barks direct their course towards this isle of bones; and, during winter, immense caravans take the same route, all the convoys drawn by dogs, returning charged with the tusks of the Mammoth, each weighing from 150 to 200 pounds. The fossil ivory thus withdrawn from the frozen north is imported into China and Europe, where it is employed for the same purposes as ordinary ivory, which is furnished, as we know, by the existing Elephant and Hippopotamus of Africa and Asia.

The Isle of Bones has served as a quarry of this valuable material, for export to China, for 500 years; and it has been exported to Europe for upwards of 100. But the supply from these strange diggings apparently remains practically undiminished. What a number of accumulated generations of these bones and tusks does not this profusion imply!

It was in Siberia that the fossil Elephant received the name of the Mammoth, and its tusks that of mammoth horns. The celebrated Russian savant, Pallas, who gave the first systematic description of the Mammoth, asserts that the name is derived from the word mama, which in the Tartar idiom signifies the earth. According to others, the name is derived from behemoth, mentioned in the Book of Job; or from the epithet mahemoth, which the Arabs add to the word “elephant,” to designate one of unusual size. A curious circumstance enough is, that this same legend of an animal living exclusively under ground, exists amongst the Chinese. They call it tien-schu, and we read, in the great Chinese work on natural history, which was written in the sixteenth century: “The animal named tien-schu, of which we have already spoken in the ancient work upon the ceremonial entitled “Lyki” (a work of the fifth century before Jesus Christ), is called also tyn-schu or yn-schu, that is to say, the mouse which hides itself. It always lives in subterranean caverns; it resembles a mouse, but is of the size of a buffalo or ox. It has no tail; its colour is dark; it is very strong, and excavates caverns in places full of rocks, and forests.” Another writer, quoting the same passage, thus expresses himself: “The tyn-schu haunts obscure and unfrequented places. It dies as soon as it is exposed to the rays of the sun or moon; its feet are short in proportion to its size, which causes it to walk badly. Its tail is a Chinese ell in length. Its eyes are small, and its neck short. It is very stupid and sluggish. When the inundations of the river Tamschuann-tuy took place (in 1571), a great many tyn-schu appeared in the plain; it fed on the roots of the plant fu-kia.”

The existence in Russia of the bones and tusks of the Mammoth is sufficiently confirmed by the following extract from an old Russian traveller, Ysbrants Ides, who, in 1692, was sent by Peter the Great as ambassador to the Emperor of China. In the extract which follows, we remark the very surprising fact of the discovery of a head and foot of the Mammoth which had been preserved in ice with all the flesh. “Amongst the hills which are situate north-east of the river Kata,” says the traveller, “the Mammuts’ tongues and legs are found, as they are also particularly on the shores of the river Jenize, Trugan, Mongamsea, Lena, and near Jakutskoi, even as far as the Frozen Ocean. In the spring, when the ice of this river breaks, it is driven in such vast quantities and with such force by the high swollen waters, that it frequently carries very high banks before it, and breaks off the tops of hills, which, falling down, discover these animals whole, or their teeth only, almost frozen to the earth, which thaw by degrees. I had a person with me who had annually gone out in search of these bones; he told it to me as a real truth, that he and his companions found the head of one of these animals, which was discovered by the fall of such a frozen piece of earth. As soon as he opened it, he found the greatest part of the flesh rotten, but it was not without difficulty that they broke out his teeth, which were placed in the fore-part of his mouth, as those of the Elephants are; they also took some bones out of his head, and afterwards came to his fore-foot, which they cut off, and carried part of it to the city of Trugan, the circumference of it being as large as that of the waist of an ordinary man. The bones of the head appeared somewhat red, as though they were tinctured with blood.

“Concerning this animal there are very different reports. The heathens of Jakuti, Tungusi, and Ostiacki, say that they continually, or at least, by reason of the very hard frosts, mostly live under ground, where they go backwards and forwards; to confirm which they tell us, that they have often seen the earth heaved up when one of these beasts was upon the march, and after he was passed, the place sink in, and thereby make a deep pit. They further believe, that if this animal comes so near to the surface of the frozen earth as to smell the air, he immediately dies, which they say is the reason that several of them are found dead on the high banks of the river, where they unawares came out of the ground.

“This is the opinion of the Infidels concerning these beasts, which are never seen.

“But the old Siberian Russians affirm, that the Mammuth is very like the Elephant, with this difference only, that the teeth of the former are firmer, and not so straight as those of the latter. They also are of opinion that there were Elephants in this country before the Deluge, when this climate was warmer, and that their drowned bodies, floating on the surface of the water of that flood, were at last washed and forced into subterranean cavities; but that after this universal deluge, the air, which before was warm, was changed to cold, and that these bones have lain frozen in the earth ever since, and so are preserved from putrefaction till they thaw, and come to light, which is no very unreasonable conjecture, though it is not absolutely necessary that this climate should have been warmer before the Flood, since the carcases of the drowned elephants were very likely to float from other places several hundred miles distant to this country in the great deluge which covered the surface of the whole earth. Some of these teeth, which doubtless have lain the whole summer on the shore, are entirely black and broken, and can never be restored to their former condition. But those which are found in good case, are as good as ivory, and are accordingly transported to all parts of Muscovy, where they are used to make combs, and all other such-like things, instead of ivory.

“The above-mentioned person also told me that he once found two teeth in one head that weighed above twelve Russian pounds, which amount to four hundred German pounds; so that these animals must of necessity be very large, though a great many lesser teeth are found. By all that I could gather from the heathens, no person ever saw one of these beasts alive, or can give any account of its shape; so that all we heard said on this subject arises from bare conjecture only.”

It is possible this recital may seem suspicious to some readers. We have ourselves felt some difficulty in believing that this head and foot were taken from the ice, with the flesh and skin, when we consider that the animal to which they belonged has been extinct probably more than ten thousand years. But the assertion of Ysbrants Ides is confirmed by respectable testimony of more recent date. In 1800, a Russian naturalist, Gabriel Sarytschew, travelled in northern Siberia. Having arrived in the neighbourhood of the Frozen Ocean, he found upon the banks of the Alasœia, which discharges itself into this sea, the entire body of a Mammoth enveloped in a mass of ice. The body was in a complete state of preservation, for the permanent contact of the ice had kept out the air and prevented decomposition. It is well known that at zero and below it, animal substances will not putrefy, so that in our households we can preserve all kinds of animal food as long as we can surround them with ice; and this is precisely what happened to the Mammoth found by Gabriel Sarytschew in the ice of the Alasœia. The rolling waters had disengaged the mass of ice which had imprisoned the monstrous pachyderm for thousands of years. The body, in a complete state of preservation and covered with its flesh as well as its entire hide, to which long hairs adhered in certain places, found itself, again, nearly erect on its four feet.