Even at the
river Amoor, where the winters are as severe as at St. Petersburg,
the tiger is an ordinary resident at all seasons. The lion was,
undoubtedly, an inhabitant of Thrace as late as the expedition of
Xerxes, whose camels they attacked; and the 'Nemaean lion,' and the
other lions which stand out in Grecian myth, as having been killed by
Hercules and the heroes, may have been the last remaining specimens
of that Felis spelaea (undistinguishable, according to some, from the
African lion), whose bones are found in the gravels and the caverns
of these isles.
And how long ago were those days of mammoths and reindeer, lions and
hyaenas? We must talk not of days, but of ages; we know nothing of
days or years. As the late lamented Professor Sedgwick has well
said:-
'We allow that the great European oscillation, which ended in the
production of the drift (the boulder clay, or till), was effected
during a time of vast, but unknown length. And if we limit our
inquiries, and ask what was the interval of time between the newest
bed of gravel near Cambridge, and the oldest bed of bogland or silt
in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, we are utterly at a loss for a
definite answer.
Pages:
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122