In drift at Fisherton, near Salisbury, thirty feet above the river Wiley, the
Greenland lemming and a new species of the Arctic genus Spermophilus have been
found, along with the mammoth, reindeer, cave-hyaena, and other mammalia suited
to a cold climate. A flint implement was taken out from beneath the bones of the
mammoth. In a higher and older deposit in the vicinity, flint tools like those
of Amiens have been discovered. Nearly all the known Post-pliocene quadrupeds
have now been found accompanying flint knives or hatchets in such a way as to
imply their coexistence with man; and we have thus the concurrent testimony of
several classes of geological facts to the vast antiquity of the human race. In
the first place, the disappearance of a great variety of species of wild animals
from every part of a wide continent must have required a vast period for its
accomplishment; yet this took place while man existed upon the earth, and was
completed before that early period when the Danish shell-mounds were formed or
the oldest of the Swiss lake-dwellings constructed. Secondly, the deepening and
widening of valleys, indicated by the position of the river gravels at various
heights, implies an amount of change of which that which has occurred during the
historical period forms a scarcely perceptible part.
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