and with epochs of vast duration, is apt to dwell with diminished interest, but which excites in the thoughtful mind a keener sympathy than all that preceded it. The general geographical disposition of the globe was then nearly as it still remains. Our own island was, during a great portion of it, insulated, as it is now. Yet it is of this familiar locality that the palæontologist remarks:--"In this island, anterior to the deposition of the drift, there was associated with the great extinct tiger, bear, and hyæna of the caves, in the destructive task of controlling the numbers of the richly developed order of the herbivorous mammalia, a feline animal, (the _Machairodus Latidens_,) as large as the tiger, and, to judge by its instruments of destruction, of greater ferocity."[20] It was within the epoch to which these strange mammals belong, and while some of them, and many other contemporaneous forms of being, still animated the scene, that man was introduced upon this stage of existence, and received dominion over every living thing. It has been supposed by more than one intelligent naturalist, that the gigantic fossil elk (_Megaceros Hibernicus_) co-existed with the human race. Dr. Hart has produced what he conceived to be conclusive evidence on this subject, derived from the appearance of a rib, pierced with an oval opening near its lower edge, "with the margin depressed on the outer and raised on the inner surface, round which there is an irregular effusion of callus; in fact, such an effect as would be produced by the head of an arrow remaining in a wound after the shaft was broken off." This conclusion Professor Owen has disputed, apparently on satisfactory grounds.[21] By a similar line of argument, however, to which he has yielded his assent,[22] it has been shewn that the north of Europe was occupied by the human race at a time when the _Bos primigenius_, the _Bison priscus_, and the _Ursus spelæus_, existed.[23] Of the _Ursus spelæus_, or great cave bear, a skeleton is preserved in the museum of Lund, found in a peat-bog in Scania, under a gravel or stone deposit, and alongside of primitive implements of the chase. Though no such direct evidence has yet been observed here, similar conclusions have been arrived at. Mr. Owen, after referring the period of existence of the great cave bear to earlier geological epochs, adds, as the conclusion from present evidence, "that the genus surviving, or under a new specific form reappearing, after the epoch of the deposition and dispersion of those enormous, unstratified, superficial accumulations of marine and fresh-water shingle and gravel, called drift and diluvium, has been continued during the formation of vast fens and turbaries upon the present surface of the island, and until the multiplication and advancement of the human race introduced a new cause of extermination, under the powerful influence of which the Bear was finally swept away from the indigenous fauna of Great