period or in the second. As the same arguments will apply to each, let us assume that the second or longer period sufficed for this purpose, and see what further admissions this assumption will involve. We have three and twenty centuries at our disposal. At the end of that time we know historically that Britain was occupied by tribes more or less savage, some of them going about almost naked, destitute of almost all the arts of civilization. We are to imagine the ancestors of this wild race migrating from Asia and slowly pioneering their way to the western limits of Europe. Necessity is the mother of invention; but these men in their difficult adventurous travel through unknown seas and pathless jungles tenanted by dangerous beasts, learn only how to forget. They forget the use of brass and iron, and take to weapons and tools of flint; they give up tillage; they give up building strong towers, and shelter themselves in wooden huts or caves and dens of the earth. The climate of Western Asia is warm and sunny, that of England often, and in many parts, bleak and foggy and cold; therefore these intelligent children of Noah, in order perhaps to harden themselves in the process of acclimatization, as they force their way into the fog and mist, instead of keeping or assuming the flowing robes of the Asiatic, exchange their garments, at any rate in battle, for a wash of paint. How interesting it would be to have the family portraits of a Highland clan from the earliest times, showing how they gradually made it fashionable to do without the various articles of clothing which one by one they have been induced to resume[54]! During the same epoch, within the same limits of time, migrating also from the warm regions of Asia, came elephants and lions, hyenas and bears, the rhinoceros and the elk. Little recked they then of change of climate, which now they so ill endure. They prowled all over Europe; they swam across the English Channel. Yet before the historical period begins in Gaul and Britain, most of these species had had time not only to make their way thither, not only to nourish and abound in these habitations, but to die out and to be forgotten. We know for certain that elephants once roamed over Devon. Did they succumb to the flint weapons of the savage? Was the same savage able to extirpate the hyena and the lion, though the representatives of those fierce beasts still partially set us at defiance in India, notwithstanding the rifles and gunpowder of modern civilization? Let us imagine that within the specified time all that has been mentioned could have happened, and that some of the animals, such as the woolly rhinoceros, had time to assume the characters of northern species, or that the climate had time for vast changes and alterations, or that the winds perhaps in those days blew hot and cold with the same breath so as to suit arctic and tropical species indifferently;--we must imagine further that within the same limits the