The lighter and more soluble particles, during that slow but vast
destruction which is going on still to this day, have been carried
far out to sea, and deposited as ooze. The heavier and coarser have
been left along the shores, as the gravels which fill the old
estuaries of the east of England.

From these gravels we can judge of the larger animals which dwelt in
that old world. About these lost lowlands wandered herds of the
woolly mammoth. Elephas primigenius, whose bones are common in
certain Cambridge gravels, whose teeth are brought up by dredgers,
far out in the German Ocean, off certain parts of the Norfolk coast.
With them wandered the woolly rhinoceros (R. tichorhinus), the
hippopotamus, the lion--not (according to some) to be distinguished
from the recent lion of Africa--the hyaena, the bear, the horse, the
reindeer, and the musk ox; the great Irish elk, whose vast horns are
so well known in every museum of northern Europe; and that mighty ox,
the Bos primigenius, which still lingered on the Continent in
Caesar's time, as the urus, in magnitude less only than the
elephant,--and not to be confounded with the bison, a relation of, if
not identical with, the buffalo of North America,--which still
lingers, carefully preserved by the Czar, in the forests of
Lithuania.

The remains of this gigantic ox, be it remembered, are found
throughout Britain, and even into the Shetland Isles. Would that any
gentleman who may see these pages would take notice of the fact, that
we have not (so I am informed) in these islands a single perfect
skeleton of Bos primigenius; while the Museum of Copenhagen, to its