Besides these European and African groups of animals, a third class ranged the London plains, probably at a greater height and in a still colder temperature than the large grass-eating mammals mentioned. These creatures, whose bones are found plentifully in the drift, are now living in a country even more specialised than the African veldt. They are the creatures of the Tartar steppes and the cold plains of Central Asia. Their names are the suslik (a Central Asian prairie dog), the pika, a little steppe hare, and an extremely odd antelope, now found in Thibet. This is a singularly ugly beast with a high Roman nose, and wool almost as thick as that of a sheep when the winter coat is on. It must have been quite common in those parts, for I have had the cores of two of their horns brought to me during the last few years.
These dry bones are not made so astonishingly interesting by their setting in the gravel as are some far more ancient remains in England. The gravel is a mere rubbish-bed, like a sea-beach, in which all things have lost their connection. I was recently shown a set of fossils far more ancient, possibly not less than 2,000,000 years old, which were all found and may be seen exactly as they lay and lived when they were on the bottom of a prehistoric river which flowed through Hampshire, across what is now the Channel, over South France, and then fell into the Mediterranean. This river crosses the Channel at Hordwell cliffs on the Solent. There is the whole section, of a great stream two miles wide, with the gravel at its edges, the sediment and sand a little lower down the sides, and the mud at the bottom. On each lie its appropriate shells. Some are like those in the Thames to-day, but many more like those of a river in Borneo. They are so thick that out of a single ounce of the mud 150 little shells were obtained. In this, too, were found the tooth of a crocodile and the bones of a spiny pike, and in other masses of clay the very reeds and bits of the trees that grew there. These sedges of the primitive ages were quite charming. Even some of their colour was preserved, and all their delicate fluting and fibre, in the fine clay. One of the branches of a tree, now turned to lignite, had possessed a thick pith. This pith had decayed, and water had trickled down the hollow like a pipe. The water was full of iron pyrites, and had first lined the tube with iron crystals and then filled up the whole hollow with a frosted network of the same. There is a striking contrast between the presence and realism of these once living things still preserving the outer forms of life and the vast and inconceivable distances of "geological time."