I should have liked to tell the student
of sea-animals--how the ice-age helps to explain, and is again
explained by, the remarkable discoveries which Dr. Carpenter and Mr.
Wyville Thompson have just made, in the deep-sea dredgings in the
North Atlantic. I should have liked to tell the botanist somewhat of
the pro-glacial flora--the plants which lived here before the ice,
and lasted, some of them at least, through all those ages of fearful
cold, and linger still on the summits of Snowdon, and the highest
peaks of Cumberland and Scotland. I should have liked to have told
the lovers of zoology about the animals which lived before the ice--
of the mammoth, or woolly elephant; the woolly rhinoceros, the cave
lion and bear, the reindeer, the musk oxen, the lemmings and the
marmots which inhabited Britain till the ice drove them out
southward, even into the South of France; and how as the ice
retreated, and the climate became tolerable once more, some of them--
the mammoth and rhinoceros, the bison, the lion, and many another
mighty beast reoccupied our lowlands, at a time when the
hippopotamus, at least in summer, ranged freely from Africa and Spain
across what was then dry land between France and England, and fed by
the side of animals which have long since retreated to Norway and to
Canada.
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