William Boyd Dawkins

“ The events with which we are dealing—the conditions of life when the lion first appeared in Britain—are so far removed from the earliest records that we can not form an idea of the interval separating them from our own time. It must, however, have been very great to allow of the changes in climate and geography, and in the wild animals of Europe, as well as of the succession of the various races and the development of civilization, which, so far as our experience goes, could not have been swift. ”

“ It is not more strange that the lion of the Old World should be found in the New, than that the musk-sheep, now only alive in the Arctic regions of North America and Greenland, should have ranged through Siberia into Europe as far to the southwest as the Pyrenees. ”

“ The river-drift hunter, armed with his roughly chipped stone implements, doubtless had great difficulty in making good his place in the struggle for existence among the beasts of prey then in the valley of the Thames, and sometimes, when he had the chance, he would be likely to eat the lion, and at other times the lion would certainly eat him. They must often have come into contact when engaged in the pursuit of the same animals. ”

“ The vast herds of migrating reindeer in Siberia and of bisons in North America cross the rivers very generally at the same points year after year, and are followed by the same kinds of beasts of prey, which bring up the rear and prey upon the stragglers. The lion, too, is proved, by the discovery of his remains in the gravel-beds of London along with reindeer, to have shared in the attack on the reindeer, horses, and bisons, as it is now to be seen among the antelopes in tropical Africa. ”

“ On the Continent the lion ranged over France, Belgium, and Germany along with the above-described animals, and having the river drift man first of all, and then the cave-man for its rivals. Evidence of this rivalry we have in a remarkable necklace found in the cave of Duruthy, in the district of the Adour in the western Pyrenees, consisting of forty canine teeth of bear and three of lion, adorned with incised figures—a harpoon, glove, fish, or seal. ”

“ THE British Lion to be dealt with in the following pages is not that of the heralds, nor is it the amiable, shy, rather tame animal just now crouching down behind "the silver streak," pretending to fear lest the foreigner should get at him unawares through a tunnel, nor yet is it the ephemeral much-to-be-pitied creature of the drawing-room. ”

“ It is a lion, indeed, the king of beasts, the story of whose coming into Britain is a part of the greater story of his sojourn in Europe, that can not be told properly without discussing the ancient geography and climate, or without dealing with some vexed points in historical criticism. ”

“ The answer is found in the fact of the presence of the living species of higher mammalia along with certain extinct species such as the mammoth, which points to one, and one only, stage in the evolution of animal life—that which is termed Pleistocene or Quaternary by the geologists, and further, to the middle stage of it, when temperate animals abounded and Arctic animals were rare in Southern Britain. ”

“ Huge tusks of elephants lie side by side with antlers of stags and skulls and bones of bisons and horses. Sometimes entire limbs have been preserved with bones in place, and in one case the entire skeletons of a family of marmots surprised in the attitude of hibernation, with paws over their noses, young and old together, stand out from a block of hardened loam. Such as these are the materials for working into a picture the conditions of life in the valley of the Thames while these fluviatile deposits were being formed. ”

“ An attempt to ascertain an historical date outside history is obviously idle, and is not furthered by an appeal to the present rate of the retrocession of waterfalls, or by speculations as to ancient changes in climate having been produced by changes in the relation of the earth to the sun. ”

“ Three kinds of rhinoceros, one of them covered with wool and hair, fed on the branches and the undergrowth; wild-boars plowed up the ground in search of food, and the glades afforded pasture to innumerable horses, bisons, and large horned uri; and, when forest and glade were alike covered with a snowy mantle, a few musk-sheep, now the most arctic of all the herbivores, were to be seen on the banks of the Thames in Kent. Among; the smaller animals we may note the pouched marmot and the water-rat. These animals were kept in check by numerous beasts of prey ”

“ The land, however, must have stood at a considerably higher level than that, since the soundings in the shallowest part of the Channel reveal a depth of about two hundred feet, and therefore an elevation of land of more than two hundred feet is necessary to allow of the migration of the lion and the other animals. ”

“ The distinct was then haunted by many extinct wild animals, and by living species no longer found together in any part of the world. Stags and roe-deer lived in the forest side by side with the gigantic and extinct Irish elk, the woolly rhinoceros, and the straight-tusked elephant. ”