some features much as now: where the oak, and elm, and ash covered great tracts, and the birch and fir clothed the hills; but where the yew and the laurel grew side by side with the custard-apple and the fan-palm, and the ground was overrun with trailers of the gourd and melon kind, but where grasses were few and scarce, the exquisite order Rosaceæ, with its beautiful flowers and grateful fruit, was rarely seen, and the aromatic Labiatæ—the thyme, and mint, and sage—were as yet unknown.

And the beasts that already tenanted this fair land were for bulk and power worthy of the domain. The Dinothere and the Mastodon wallowed and browsed where great London now crowds its princely palaces. Through the greenwood shades of the forests of oak wandered hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses of several kinds, the long-tusked mammoth, and two or three species of horses. Two gigantic oxen—a bison and a urus—roamed over the fir-clad hills of Scotland, and a curious flat-headed ox, of small size and minute horns, made Ireland its peculiar home. That island, too, was the metropolis of a colossal fallow-deer, whose remains, ticketed as those of the Irish Elk, astonish us in our museums. It stood seven feet in height at the withers, and waved its branching antlers, eleven feet wide, twelve feet and upwards above the ground;[6] yet its magnificent stature could not preserve it from a not infrequent fate, that of becoming intombed in the deep bogs of its native isle. Britain had, moreover, a stag of scarcely less gigantic proportions, with the reindeer of the north, and the smaller kinds with which we are now familiar.

All these herbivores, and numberless smaller genera, some now extinct, some surviving, were kept in check by powerful predatory tyrants, for whose representatives we must now look to the jungles of India or the burning karroos of Southern Africa. The Lion and the Tiger stalked over these isles, and a terrible tiger-like creature, the Machairode, of even superior size and power to the scourge of the Bengal jungle, with curved and saw-edged canine-teeth, hung upon the flanks of the cervine and bovine herds, and sprang upon the fattest of them. Then, too, there was a vast Bear, huger and mightier than the fearful grizzly bear of America, which haunted caves, and prowling around forced down with its horrid paws the shaggy bull, and broke his stout neck by main force, and dragged the body home to devour at leisure. And many of these caves, the holes and chasms of the limestone districts, were inhabited by a gigantic species of Hyena, which seems to have existed in great numbers, so that the caverns are strewn all over, from end to end, with thousands of teeth and disjointed bones, both of the hyenas themselves and of the other carnivores; shewing that there they lived and died in successive generations; and, mainly, of other creatures, of very varied species, great and small, most of them cracked, and crushed, and gnawed, shewing the plain marks of the powerful conical teeth of those obscene nocturnal animals.

Thus I have endeavoured to draw a picture, vague and imperfect, I know, of some of the more remarkable and prominent features of the primeval earth, limiting the sketch to those forms which we know only by their fossil remains. In endeavouring to paint their contour and general appearance, and still more their habits and instincts, conjecture must be largely at work—a conjecture, however, which takes for its basis the anatomical exigencies of the osseous structure, and the analogy of existing creatures the most nearly related to the fossil.

These forms, many of them so huge and uncouth, are well known as having tenanted various regions of the earth during what is known as the Tertiary Era, in its later periods. They certainly do not exist in those regions now. When did their life—their species-life—terminate? I have been assuming that they were upon the earth, as living sentient beings, in the earliest age of what we call the historic period—that is, according to the chronology of the Word of God, which must be true, within the last six thousand years. This assumption is so heterodox, that unsupported by evidence, it would be generally rejected; let us then inquire what evidence there is that man was an inhabitant of the globe contemporaneously with these huge giants of the bestial creation.

I do not pretend to offer positive evidence concerning the synchronism of all the animals I have been describing with man; but, as there is no doubt that they were all contemporaneous, inter se, if we can attain to good grounds for concluding his co-existence with some of them, it may be no unfair presumption that the case was so with the others.

And first, with respect to the Colossochelys Atlas, that vast fossil land tortoise of the Sewalik hills, in the north of India, whose carapace may have covered an area of twelve or fifteen feet in diameter, and whose entire length, as in walking, when head and tail were protruded, could not have been much less than thirty feet. The discoverers of this interesting relic, Dr Falconer and Major Cauntley, have discussed the question of its probable cessation of existence with some care; and they have come to the conclusion "that there are fair grounds for entertaining the belief, as probable, that the Colossochelys Atlas may have lived down to an early period of the human epoch, and become extinct since." This they infer on two grounds: first, from the fact that, in the same strata, which are not limited to the Sewalik hills, but extend, with the remains of this immense tortoise, all over the great Indian area, from Ava to the Gulf of Cambay, other tortoises, crocodiles, &c., which were contemporary with the Colossochelys, have survived to the present time; and, secondly, from mythologic and cosmogonic traditions of many eastern nations, having reference to a tortoise of such gigantic size as to be associated in the current fables with an elephant.[7]

Elian, the Greek naturalist, quoting Megasthenes, a still older authority, who resided several years in India, and who collected a good deal of interesting information concerning the country, reports that in the sea around Ceylon there were found tortoises of such enormous dimensions that huts were made of their shells, each shell being fifteen cubits (or twenty-two feet) long; so that several people were able to find comfortable shelter under it from the rain and sun.[8] And both Strabo and Pliny[9] assert that the Chelonophagi, who inhabited the shores of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, converted the enormous shells of the turtles which they caught into roofs for their houses and boats for their little voyages. It has been suggested that the Colossochelys may have given origin to these statements; but I rather think the great sea-turtles of the genus Chelone are referred to, the convex shells of which are known in our own day to reach to a length of eight feet or upwards.

The circumstances