A Day's Elephant Hunting in Essex. 51
British mammalia. In our region of softer rocks, the river
valleys perforin the preservative and historic functions of
the hyaena-dens and bone-caverns of northern and western
Britain.
III.
THE CAPTURES.
Yours, yours are the culpable shoulders
That bore off our bones from the quarries, to raise
Amazement and fear when exposed to the gaze
Of featherless biped beholders.
—Horatio Smith (Daubeny's Fugitive Poems).
Our pursuit of the feral denizens of the Thames Valley
this summer Saturday afternoon has been so exciting, that
we now find we have unwittingly been led on from familiar
tracts of Essex scenery into a new and mysterious geo-
graphical region. In vain we seek to recognise the scene
before us as belonging to modern or historical England.
A new and hitherto unmapped arrangement of land and
water stretches far away, and the animal world that dwells
around is wonderfully diverse from that we have hitherto
seen. We are still, it would seem, in the country of the
Thames Valley ; but the tame and placid stream which a
moment since was winding unseen in the valley below us,
full four miles away, suddenly arises before us as a wide
and impetuous river, that comes swelling up the shore till
its waters lap our feet. With torrential volume it brings
down from its inland course the terrestrial spoils of the
country it has devastated—the carcasses of mammoths,
gigantic deer, and British rhinoceroses, whose fellows are
tramping and browsing in these aboriginal woodlands
around us. Huge shaggy aurochs and great-horned uri,
far-off ancestors of the gigantic oxen that the Romans
saw when they first invaded the wooded wilds of uncivilized
Europe, are
Crashing the forest in their race,
and sharing again with the woolly-clad elephant and rhi-
noceros these gloaming Essex wilds.