The fissures of the rocks of Gibraltar, Cette, Nice, Uliveta near Pisa, and other places on the shores of the Mediterranean, are filled with a red and hard cement, which envelopes fragments of rock and fresh-water shells, and numerous bones of quadrupeds, the greater part fractured. These concretions are termed osseous brecciæ. The bones which they contain sometimes present characters sufficient to prove that they have belonged to unknown animals, or at least to animals foreign to Europe. There are found, for example, four species of deer, three of which have characters in their teeth, which are only observed in the deer of the Indian Archipelago. There is a fifth near Verona, the horns of which exceed in magnitude those of the Canadian deer[312]. There also occur, in certain places, along with bones of rhinoceroses, and other quadrupeds of this period, those of a deer so much resembling the reindeer, that it would be difficult to assign distinctive characters to it; a circumstance which is so much the more extraordinary, that the reindeer is at the present day confined to the coldest regions of the north, while the whole genus of rhinoceroses belongs to the torrid zone.[313] There exist in the strata of which we speak, remains of a species very similar to the fallow-deer, but a third larger,[314] and prodigious quantities of horns, very much resembling those of our present stag[315], as well as bones, very like those of the aurochs[316] and domestic ox[317], two very distinct species, which had been erroneously confounded by the naturalists who preceded us. The entire heads, however, resembling those of these two animals, as well as that of the musk-ox of Canada[318], which have often been extracted from the earth, do not come from localities sufficiently well determined to enable us to assert that these species had been contemporaries of the great pachydermata, of which we have made mention above. The osseous brecciæ of the shores of the Mediterranean have also afforded two species of _Lagomys_,[319] animals, the genus of which exists at the present day only in Siberia; two species of rabbits[320], lemmings, and rats of the size of the water-rat and domestic mouse[321]. In the caves of England two species are also found[322]. The osseous brecciæ even contain bones of shrew-mice and lizards[323]. In certain sandy strata of Tuscany, there are teeth of a porcupine[324], and in those of Russia heads of a species of beaver, larger than ours, which M. Fischer has named _Trogontherium_[325]. But it is more particularly in the class Edentata that these races of animals belonging to the period before the last assume a size much superior to that of their present congeners, and even rise to a magnitude altogether gigantic.