The very rushes, which grew on the river banks, lie caked together, with the teeth of the rats which harboured in them. The pine-cones still, too, lie there, their surfaces scarcely more abraded than when they dropped from the tree into the tepid waters. Along the muddy river shore browsed the paloplothere, whilst his mate crashed through the jungle of club-mosses. Groves of palms stood inland, or fringed the banks, swarming with land-snakes. Birds waded in the shallows. But no human voice sounded: nothing was to be heard but the screaming of the river-fowl, and the deep bellow of the tapir-shaped palæothere, and the wolf-like bark of the hyænodon. This description is no mere fancy, but taken from the remains actually discovered in the Hordle Cliffs. I have had no need to borrow from the fossils of the Headon and Binstead Beds, or the caves of Montmartre. On these cliffs, too, is scored the history of the past. Here lie the little _Nuculæ_, still crimson and pink as when they first settled down through the water into their bed of sand; and teeth of dichodons still bright with enamel. The struggle of life raged as fiercely then as now. And the pierced skull of the palæothere still tells where it received its death-wound from its foe the crocodile. But other things do they reveal. They plainly show, as was, I believe, first suggested by Mr. Searles Wood, that in the Middle-Eocene period Europe and America were connected. The pachyderms of Hordle are allied to the tapirs of the New World. The same alligators still swim in the warm rivers of Florida: and the same type of sauroid fish, whose scales spangle the Freshwater Beds, is now only found in the West. [Illustration: Shells from the Brook Beds.] CHAPTER XXI. THE BOTANY.—THE FLOWERING PLANTS AND FERNS. [Illustration: Barrow’s Moor Wood.] Closely connected with the geology of the Forest are its flowers. And though mere geology could not tell us the whole Flora of a district, yet we might always be able, by its help and that of the latitude, to give the typical plants. Close to the chalk, the Forest possesses none of the chalk flowers. No bee-orchis or its congeners, although so common on all the neighbouring Wiltshire downs, bloom. No travellers’-joy trails amongst its thickets, although every hedge in Dorsetshire, just across the Avon, is clothed in the autumn with its white fleece of seeds. No yellow bird’s-nest (_Monotropa Hypopitys_) shades itself under its beeches, though growing only a few miles distant on the chalk. Still, here there are some contradictions. The chalk-loving yew appears to be indigenous. Several plants which we might reasonably expect, as herb-Paris, the bird-nest orchis (_Neottia Nidus-avis_), and the common mezereon (_Daphne Mezereum_), are wanting.