Turning from these difficult questions of time, we may now look at the assemblage of land-animals presented by the Post-glacial period. Here, for the first time in the great series of continental elevations and depressions, we find the newly-emerging land peopled with familiar forms. Nearly all the modern European animals have left their bones in the clays, gravels, and cavern deposits which belong to this period; but with them are others either not now found within the limits of temperate Europe, or altogether extinct. Thus the remarkable fact comes out, that the uprising land was peopled at first with a more abundant fauna then that which it now sustains, and that many species, and among these some of the largest and most powerful, have been weeded out, either before the advent of man or in the changes which immediately succeeded that event. That in the Post-glacial period so many noble animal species should have been overthrown in the struggle for existence, without leaving any successors, at least in Europe, is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of life on our planet. According to. Pictet,[AQ] the Post-glacial beds of Europe afford ninety-eight species of mammals, of which fifty-seven still live there, the remainder being either locally or wholly extinct. According to Mr. Boyd Dawkins,[AR] in Great Britain about twelve Pliocene species survived the Glacial period, and reappeared in the British Islands in the Post-glacial. To these were added forty-one species making in all fifty-three, whose remains are found in the gravels and caves of the latter period. Of these, in the Modern period twenty-eight, or rather more then one-half, survive, fourteen are wholly extinct, and eleven are locally extinct. [AQ] Palæontologie. [AR] "Journal of Geological Society," and Palæontographical Society's publications. [Illustration: BRITAIN IN THE POST-PLIOCENE AGE. Musk-sheep, Hippopotamus, Machairodus, Mammoth, Wooly Rhinoceros, Long-fronted Ox, and Irish stag. The animals are taken from Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins's picture, "Struggles of Life among British Animals of the Antediluvian Times." London: 1853. The landscape is that of the later part of the cold Post-pliocene period.]