Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/124

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EARLY MAN IN BRITAIN.
[CHAP. V.

Incoming Living Species of Temperate Habit.

The incoming Pleistocene species, constituting the second group, now found in the temperate zones of Europe, Asia, and America, consist of animals of widely-different habits and range. The musk shrew, now restricted in Europe to the streams of southern Russia, and especially to the region of the Don and Volga, haunted the rivers of Norfolk (Bacton) in the Pleistocene age. The pouched marmot, now ranging eastwards from Austria and Poland through southern Russia, the Crimea, and Siberia to Kamtchatka, hibernated in Wiltshire (Fisherton) and in Somerset (Mendip Caves); and the field vole of central Europe and western Siberia (Arvicola arvalis) ranged as far to the west as Bath. At the present time three species of pika or tailless hares inhabit Siberia, of which one (Lagomys pusillus) lives as far west as the Volga. In the Pleistocene age the genus ranged as far to the west as Gibraltar, and the above-mentioned species seems to me identical with the (Lagomys spelæus) cave-pika of Brixham and Kent's Hole. The saiga antelope, now found no farther to the west than Poland, and most abundant in the region between the Volga and the river Irtisch, south of 55° N. lat., migrated as far to the west as Auvergne (Caves of the Dordogne); and the fallow deer, now only indigenous in the warm regions of the Mediterranean, wandered as far north as Harwich, being represented by a variety (Cer-

    Mammalium, 8vo, Stutgart., 1830; Forsyth. Major, Atti Soc. Tosc. Sc. Nat. Pisa, iii. 1876-9; Murray, Geographical Distribution of Animals, 4to; Pallas, Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica, 3 vols. 4to, Spicilegia Zoologica, 4to, 1777; Pennant, Arctic Zoology, 2 vols. 4to, 1784; Owen, British Fossil Mammalia, 8vo, 1846, Palæontology, 8vo, 1860; Richardson, Sir John Fauna Boreali-Americana, 4to; Zimmerman, Specimen Zoologiæ, 4to, 1777.