ESSAY X. ON THE REMAINS OF CARNIVOROUS ANIMALS, FOUND IN ENGLAND. WE experience much of the Creator's goodness; perceive much of his wisdom; and are perpetually impressed with indications of his power; whilst we are bound to admit far more of each than we can either see, or feel; but no part of his ordination, in the system of the universe, is invested with such lustre, and impresses the mind with such clear and ample convictions of infinite goodness, wisdom, and power, as the position which the pole is now made to hold with respect to the ecliptic. Doubtless, all other parts of the divine economy result from equal beneficence, and conduce to the best ends ; but of them elude the grasp of our minds. Yet many here is an arrangement, bearing the full impress of Omnipotence, (an apparent violation of order, which proves the perfection of design!) admirable for its simplicity, and grand in its results; in which our happiness is involved, if not our very existence, and which would transform the earth into a paradise, if there existed the same harmony in the moral world which we behold in the natural. But it may be replied, by those whose opinions approximate in any degree to those of Burnet, that when a positive effect has been produced, and the cause is uncertain, the most probable solution must be adopted, even though that solution should not be wholly unencumbered with difficulties. This reasoning is perfectly correct, and the question now to be determined is, what cause does really present itself as the most probable, for reconciling the existence of these animals to our northern climate. It is presumed, if there be justice in the preceding remarks, that the reader will now relinquish the idea of any alteration of the poles, as the most rational explanation why tropical animals should once have abounded in the temperate zone, and particularly in our own island. But what better solution can be substituted? It is certain that the animals before enumerated, once flourished in England, and the questions recur, How came they here? What caused an alteration in their natures? and, admitting that they were once indigenous to our island, what occasioned their extinction? and being expelled, why should not the same cause (whatever it was) which brought them here, produce the same effect, in reinstating them once more, when the fortuitous means of their expulsion ceased to operate? The reluctance which has prevailed to admit the existence of carnivorous animals in England, as their native region, has arisen not only from their alleged incapacity to endure the rigours of our climate, but from the physical impossibility of their crossing the sea, and seating themselves in an island so far removed from the continental shore. Upon considering the validity of the first objection, it will perhaps be found to be nugatory. Man is the creature of all climates. He possesses a constitution which is suited for, or, at least, which accommodates itself to every region under heaven; and why should not the same adaptation to circumstances exist in quadrupeds? Their clothing always bears an exact proportion to the degree of heat or cold which they are required to sustain, and it is an observable circumstance, that the same animals vary the texture of their clothing accordingly as they are exposed to the extremes of heat or cold; and that interchangeably. The woolly animal, on being transferred to the tropical climates, changes his wool for hair, and the hairy animal of the south, soon finds himself invested with wool, on ascending into the higher latitudes; so that what contrivance effects for the rational creation, nature effects for the irrational. If these carnivorous animals do not at present inhabit the forests of our temperate climate, may not the exclusion arise from some accidental, or assignable cause, rather than from any inherent and insuperable constitutional impediment? That there is nothing in the nature of the animals themselves adverse to the milder climates, whether their present abodes, (in an unconstrained state,) be in the warmest or the coldest regions, is manifested by the circumstance that the land animals of the whole tribe of Mammalia, not only might exist in England, but, that, at this very moment, they actually do menageries abundantly testify. ; as our But after the fact is established that these carnivorous animals can, and do, as well as did, inhabit this island, and were, in the strictest sense, natives of the country, the second objection occurs; - How could wild beasts, which have an instinctive aversion to water, and many of which were never known to swim across a broad river, subdue their natural antipathies, and defy the billows which separated England from the continent? This argument must be deemed unanswerable, unless some new channel of approach should be discovered; and the following may be adopted, till some other be produced, less encumbered with difficulties. Whether we are able to ascertain the medium, or not, some adequate medium must have existed, for it is too late to question the axiom, that no body can advance from one position to another, without passing through the intermediate space. But what mode of access to Britain could these animals have found? Were these animals brought here? Domestic and serviceable animals are conveyed, by man, from one spot to another, but beasts of prey, for the purpose of colonization, never are. From the days of Nimrod, “that mighty hunter," to the present, a mortal enmity has existed between man and such animals. They never meet but to wage war. The beasts of the field exist only by sufferance. The Almighty made this world" to be inhabited," but as man cannot at present occupy the whole of the earth's surface, the unappropriated parts are tenanted by wild animals, many species of which have become extinct, and all others which are incapable of forming a league with man, by administering to his pleasures or his wants, must irremediably perish, before the march of human population. Independently of the impossibility that such animals should have been brought here, at the period when these beasts prevailed in England, man, in all human probability, was unknown in this island; for, had he divided the empire of the soil with his quadruped competitors, it is not to be supposed, but that human bones, in such a case, would be sometimes found associated with those of beasts, either in caverns, or diluvial soils; but such an instance, in this country, at least, is not on record. Human bones have indeed been recently found in the Valley of Elster, near Kostritz, in Germany, in alluvial soils, and imperfectly petrified; as described by Baron Von Schlotheim, but these deposits evidently took place posterior to the deluge, and it is a demonstrative proof, as Cuvier has well observed, that beasts must have prevailed in Europe, long prior to man, as their remains are often found fossilized in the more ancient strata, as well as in caverns; but those belonging to man are never so found. But If the carnivorous animals did not swim hither, and were not brought, was the cold once so intense in Europe, as to allow them to arrive through the agency of ice, by freezing even salt water? This is a feeble supposition, from opposing the experience of two thousand years, during which time no ice has invested our seas. Some, on the contrary, have supposed that our climate was warmer than it now is, from the successful cultivation of the grape, which once prevailed in England; when Smithfield was a vineyard, and Gloucestershire furnished wines, both in quality and quantity, which superseded the necessity of importation. instead of being warmer, as these suppose, in ancient times, the probability is admitted, that the temperature of these climates may have been somewhat colder than it is at present, from the well-known tendency which woods and morasses have to produce cold, and the amelioration of which has always borne a correspondence with the cultivation of the soil. Some direct authority might also be adduced, to prove the more rigorous state of our winters, in the earlier periods. The Rhine is the most rapid river in Europe, which, in these times, uniformly resists the power of frost, and yet the highest authority which antiquity furnishes (Cæ. Com.) represents the Rhine, not only as having been frozen over, but the ice to have been sufficiently firm to enable the Roman cohorts to pass over it, from Gaul into Germany. But whatever facilities the Rhine might once have furnished for the passage of carnivorous animals, it would require a large portion of credulity to believe that, the twenty-mile strait, which separated Gaul from |