species, to have contributed towards the tamed stock; none of these, however, retain its well-marked cranial characteristics, which are conspicuously shown in the lengthened forehead. There are decidedly, however, as far as Ireland is concerned, very many variations in the curvature of the horns of skulls dug out of peat, which would seem to point to a long course of domestication; at all events, whether the animal was or was not a wild denizen of the land, it was very generally reared and eaten in England and Ireland during the early colonization of the islands.
Few facts in the natural history of the British Islands are more surprising than that elephants, rhinoceroses, and a species of hippopotamus once dwelt in our land, when its physical aspect was not materially different from what obtains at the present day. No doubt these and other extinct mammals were more plentiful when Great Britain formed part of the continent of Europe, and when the Thames and other rivers were broader, as testified by their deposits. Still there is evidence to show that they lingered on after Great Britain had become separated from the mainland, a few only surviving the prehistoric period.
The Thames valley in olden times, as shown by the animal remains found in its deposits—i.e., remains of elephants, rhinoceroses, and river-horses, deer, oxen, and so forth—must have presented a wilder aspect than even the banks of the upper Nile at the present day.
Not many years ago, whilst some workmen were employed in deepening a cellar below a club in Charles Street, St. James's, they discovered the grinding tooth of an Elephant, a portion of the back-bone of the Giant Ox, and the curved canine tooth of a Hippopotamus, all in the clay which underlies the gravel so well known to London geologists.
The Great Hippopotamus, which inhabited England before the glacial epoch, returned again at its close, along with other quadrupeds. It appears to have been not uncommon, seeing that remains have been found in bone caves in Devonshire, South Wales, Somersetshire, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Gloucestershire, Middlesex, and Yorkshire, and in the deposits of the rivers Thames, Ouse, Cam, and Avon. There is only one record, and that not well authenticated, of its occurrence in Ireland,
