HYENA SPELÆA.
Cave Hyæna. (Pleistocene.)
The group of mammals which, in Europe, at least, immediately preceded the human period seems to have been everywhere a remarkable one; and nowhere was it more so than in the British islands. Our present mammaliferous fauna is rather poor; but the contents of the later deposits show that we must regard it as but a mere fragment of a very noble one. Associated with species that still exist in the less cultivated parts of the country, such as the badger, the fox, the wild cat, the roe and the red deer, we find the remains of great animals, whose congeners must now be sought for in the intertropical regions. Britain, during the times of the boulder clay, and for ages previous, had its native elephant, its two species of rhinoceros, its hippopotamus, its hyæna, its tiger, its three species of bears, its two species of beavers, its great elk, and its gigantic deer. Forms now found widely apart, and in very different climates, meet within the British area. During at least the earlier times of the group, the temperature of our island seems to have been very much what it is now. As I have already had occasion to remark, the British oak flourished on its plains and lower slopes, and the birch and Scotch fir on its hills. And yet under these familiar trees the lagomys or tailless hare, a form now mainly restricted to Siberia and the wilds of Northern America, and the reindeer, an animal whose proper habitat at the present time is Lapland, were associated with forms that are now only to be found between the tropics, such as that of the hippopotamus and rhinoceros. These last, however, unequivocally of extinct species, seem to have been adapted to live in a temperate climate; and we know from the famous Siberian specimen, that the British elephant, with its covering of long hair and closely-felted wool, was fitted to sustain the rigors of a very severe one. It is surely a strange fact, but not less true than strange, that since hill and dale assumed in Britain their present configuration, and the oak and birch flourished in its woods, there were caves in England haunted for ages by families of hyænas,—that they dragged into their dens with the carcasses of long extinct animals those of the still familiar denizens of our hill-sides, and feasted, now on the lagomys, and now on the common hare,—that they now fastened on the beaver or the reindeer, and now upon the roebuck or the goat. In one of these caves, such of the bones as projected from the stiff soil have been actually worn smooth in a narrow passage where the hyænas used to come in contact with them in passing out and in; and for several feet in depth the floor beneath is composed almost exclusively of gnawed fragments, that still exhibit the deeply indented marks of formidable teeth. In the famous Kirkdale cave alone, parts of the skeletons of from two to three hundred hyænas have been detected, mixed with portions of the osseous framework of the cave-tiger, the cave-bear, the ox, the deer, the mammoth, and the rhinoceros. That cave must have been a den of wild creatures for many ages ere the times of the boulder clay, during which period it was shut up from all access to the light and air by a drift deposit, and lay covered over until again laid open by some workmen little more than thirty years ago. Not only were many of the wild animals of the country which still exist contemporary for a time with its extinct bears, tigers, and elephants, but it seems at least highly probable that several of our domesticated breeds derived their origin from progenitors whose remains we find entombed in the bone-caves and other deposits of the same age; though of course the changes effected by domestication in almost all the tame animals renders the question of their identity with the indigenous breeds somewhat obscure. Cuvier was, however, unable to detect any difference between the skeleton of a fossil horse, contemporary with the elephant, and that of our domestic breed: a fossil goat of the same age cannot be distinguished from the domesticated animal; and one of our two fossil oxen (Bos longifrons) does not differ more from some of the existing breeds than these have, in the course of time, been made, chiefly by artificial means, to differ among themselves. But of one of our domestic tribes no trace has yet been found in the rocks: like the cod family among fishes, or the Rosaceæ among plants, it seems to have preceded man by but a very brief period. And certainly, if created specially for his use, though the pride of the herald might prevent him from selecting it as in aught typical of the human race, it would yet not be easy to instance a family of animals that has ministered more extensively to his necessities. I refer to the sheep,—that soft and harmless creature, that clothes civilized man everywhere in the colder latitudes with its fleece,—that feeds him with its flesh,—that gives its bowels to be spun into the catgut with which he refits his musical instruments,—whose horns he has learned to fashion into a thousand useful trinkets,—and whose skin, converted into parchment, served to convey to later times the thinking of the first full blow of the human intellect across the dreary gulf of the middle ages.
At length the human period begins. A creature appears upon the scene unlike all that had preceded him, and whose nature it equally is to look back upon the events of the past,—among other matters, on that succession of beings upon the planet which he inhabits, with which we are this evening attempting to deal,—and to anticipate at least one succession more, in that still future state in which he himself is again to appear, in happier circumstances than now, and in a worthier character. We possess another history of the primeval age and subsequent chronology of the human family than that which we find inscribed in the rocks. And it is well that we do so. From various causes, the geologic evidence regarding the period of man's first appearance on earth is singularly obscure. That custom of "burying his dead out of his sight," which obtained, we know, in the patriarchal times, and was probably in use ever since man came first under the law of death, has had the effect of mingling his remains with those of creatures that were extinct for ages ere he began to be. The cavern, once a haunt of carnivorous animals, that in the first simple ages of his history had furnished him with a shelter when living, became his burying-place when dead; and thus his bones, and his first rude attempts in pottery and weapon-making, have been found associated with the remains of the cave-hyæna and cave-tiger, with the teeth of the ancient hippopotamus, and the tusks of the primeval elephant. The evidence on the point, too,—from the great paucity of human remains of a comparatively remote period, and from the circumstance that they are rarely seen by geologists in the stratum in which they occur,—is usually very imperfect in its details. Further, it is an evidence obnoxious to suspicion, from the fact that a keen controversy has arisen on the subject of man's antiquity, that such fragments of man himself or of his works as manifest great age have been pressed to serve as weapons in the fray,—that, occurring always in superficial and local deposits, their true era may be greatly antedated, under the influence of prejudice, by men who have no design wilfully to deceive,—and that while, respecting the older formations, with their abundant organisms, the conclusions of any one geologist may be tested by all the others, the geologist who once in a lifetime picks up in a stratified sand or clay a stone arrow-head or a human bone, finds that the data on which he founds his conclusions may be received or rejected by his contemporaries, but not re-examined. It may be safely stated, however, that that ancient record in which man is represented as the lastborn of creation, is opposed by no geologic fact; and that if, according to Chalmers, "the Mosaic writings do not fix the antiquity of the globe," they at least do fix—making allowance, of course, for the varying estimates of the chronologer—"the antiquity of the human species." The great column of being, with its base set in the sea, and inscribed, like some old triumphal pillar, with many a strange form,—at once hieroglyphic and figure,—bears, as the ornately sculptured capital, which imparts beauty and finish to the whole, reasoning, responsible man. There is surely a very wonderful harmony manifested in the proportions of that nice sequence in which the invertebrates—the fishes, the reptiles, the birds, the marsupials, the placental mammals, and, last of all, man himself—are so exquisitely arranged. It reminds us of the fine figure employed by Dryden in his first Ode for St. Cecilia's Day,—a figure which, viewed in the light cast on it by the modern science of Palæontology, stands out in bolder relief than that in which it could have appeared to the poet himself:—
"From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began;
From harmony to harmony,
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man."
| Fig. 77.
ASAPHUS CAUDATUS. (Silurian.) | Fig. 78. ORTHOCERAS LATERALE. (Mountain Limestone.) | Fig. 79.
SPIRIGERINA RETICULARIS. (Old Red Sandstone.) |
| Fig. 80.
A. MARGARITATUS. (Lias.) | Fig. 81.
A. BISULCATUS. (Lias.) |
| Fig. 82. BELEMNITELLA MUCRONATA. (Chalk.) | Fig. 83. BELEMNITES SULCATUS. (Oolite.) |
In the limits to which I have restricted myself, I have been able to do little more than simply to chronicle the successive eras in which the various classes and divisions of the organic kingdom, vegetable and animal, make their appearance in creation. I have produced merely a brief record of the various births, in their order, of that great family whose father is God. And in pursuing such a plan, much, of necessity, must have been omitted. I ought perhaps to have told you, that very rarely, if ever, do the master forms of a period constitute the prevailing or typical organisms of its deposits. Of the three great divisions of which the geologic scale consists,—Palæozoic, Secondary, and Tertiary,—the first, or ichthyic period, is marked chiefly, not by its great fishes, but by the peculiar character of its brachipodous and cephalopodous mollusca, and in its earlier stages by its three-lobed crustaceæ; the second or reptilian period was emphatically the period of the ammonite and belemnite; while the third and last, or mammalian period, was that of gastropodous and conchiferous molluscs, impressed, generically at least, by all the features of the group which still exists in our seas. Save in a few local deposits, fishes do not form the prevailing organisms in the formations of the age of fishes; nor reptiles in the formations of the age of reptiles; nor yet mammals in the formations of the age of mammals. Nay, it is not improbable that the recent or human period may be marked most prominently in the future, when it comes to exist simply as a geologic system, by a still humbler organism than most of these molluscs. On almost all rocky shores a line of pale gray may be seen at low water, running for mile after mile along the belt that has been laid bare at the bases of the cliffs by the fall of the tide. It owes its pale color to millions of millions of a small balanus (B. balanoides), produced in such amazing abundance in the littoral zone as to cover with a rough crust every minute portion of rock and every sedentary shell. Other species of the same genus (B. crenatus and B. porcatus) occupy the depths of the sea beyond; and their remains, washed ashore by the waves, and mingled with those of the littoral species, form often great accumulations of shell sand. I have seen among the Hebrides a shell sand accumulated along the beach to the depth of many feet, of which fully two thirds was composed of the valves and compartments of balanidæ; and a similar sand on the east coast of Scotland, a little to the south of St. Andrews, formed in still larger proportions of the fragments of a single species,—Balanus crenatus. Now, this genus, so amazingly abundant at the present time in every existing sea, and whose accumulated remains bid fair to exist as great limestone rocks in the future, had no existence in the Palæozoic or Secondary ages. It first appears in the times of the earlier Tertiary, in, however, only a single species; and, becoming gradually of more and more importance as a group, it receives its fullest numerical development in the present time. And thus the remains of a sub-class of animals, low in their standing among the articulata, may form one of the most prominent Palæontological features of the human period. But enough for the present of circumstance and detail.
ASTARTE OMALII.