the first in high northern latitudes.[1] The Cyrena fluminalis and the Unio littoralis, to which last I shall presently allude, were not among the number.
I long ago suggested the hypothesis, that in the basin of the Thames there are indications of a meeting in the post-pliocene period of a northern and southern fauna. To the northern group may have belonged the mammoth (Elephas primigenius) and the Rhinoceros tichorhinus, both of which Pallas found in Siberia, preserved with their flesh in the ice. With these are occasionally associated the rein-deer. In 1855 the skull of the musk-ox (Bubalus moschatus) was also found in the ochreous gravel of Maidenhead, by the Rev. C. Kingsley and Mr. Lubbock; the identification of this fossil with the living species being made by Professor Owen. A second fossil skull of the same arctic animal was afterwards found by Mr. Lubbock near Bromley, in the valley of a small tributary of the Thames; and two others were dug up at Bath Easton from the gravel of the valley of the Avon. Professor Owen has truly said, that, 'as this quadruped has a constitution fitting it at present to inhabit the high northern regions of America, we can hardly doubt that its former companions, the warmly-clad mammoth and the two-horned woolly rhinoceros (R. tichorhinus), were in like manner capable of supporting life in a cold climate.'[2]
I have alluded at p. 144 to the recent discovery of this same buffalo near Chauny, in the valley of the Oise, in France; and in 1856 I found a skull of it preserved in the museum at Berlin, which Professor Quenstedt, the curator, had correctly named so long ago as 1836, when the fossil was dug out of drift, in the hill called the Kreuzberg, in the southern
