The insular character of Great Britain renders it a peculiarly interesting epitome of archæological study, a microcosm complete in itself, and little less ample in the variety of its records than the great continent, divorced from it by the ocean; yet the question, as we have seen, is reopened: Was it already insular when its earliest nomad trod its unhistoric soil? The Caledonian allophylian, as we now know, pursued the gigantic whale in an estuary which swept along the base of the far-inland Ochils; and guided his tiny canoe, above an ocean-bed, which had to be upheaved into the sunshine of many centuries before it could become the arena of deeds that live associated on the historic page with the names of Agricola, Edward, Wallace and Bruce, of Montrose, Cromwell, and Mar. Its history dawns in an era of geological mutation; yet not more so than is now at work in other and neighbouring historic lands. It is a type of the changes which were gradually transforming that strange post-tertiary microcosm into the familiar historic Britain of this nineteenth century. From an examination of the detritus and included fossils, and the disclosures of peat-mosses, we learn that, when the British Isles were in possession of their first colonists, the country must have been almost entirely covered with forests, and overrun by animals long since extinct. In the deposits of marl that underlie the accumulated peat-bogs of Scotland and Ireland occur abundant remains of the fossil elk, an animal far exceeding in magnitude any existing species of deer. Its bones have been found associated with skeletons of the mammoth and other proboscidians, and with numerous teeth, jaws, and detached bones of the extinct rhinoceros, hippopotamus, hyæna, fossil ox, etc.; yet no doubt is now entertained that the elk was contemporaneous with man in the British Isles. Stone hatchets, flint arrow-heads, and fragments of pottery have been recovered alongside of its skeleton, under circumstances that satisfy geologists, as well as archæologists, of their contemporaneous deposition; its bones have been found with the tool-marks of the flint chisel and saw; and evidence of various kinds seems to exhibit this gigantic deer as an object of the chase, and a source of primitive food, clothing, and tools.