108 EPPING FOREST
nomads, moving along the river banks subsisting
on fish and forest animals, clothed in skins of wild
beasts, his weapons rudely-fashioned stone celts,
flint-pointed arrows, and others made of bone :
a veritable troglodyte, without a settlement and
owning no cultivated plot of land, nor any domestic
animal save the dog, man's earliest friend and
companion. He hunted the reindeer, made pit-
falls for the mammoth, and lived indifferently on
the wild horse, the reindeer, and wilder cattle.
He was not insular then, but belonged to the same
type as the aborigines of Western Europe, and, like
the cave-men of France, incised pictures of the
animals he saw and hunted upon the bones left
from his repasts.
The great herds of wild horses, of bison, rein-
deer, and elephants (preyed upon by the lion, bear,
hyaena, and wolf) moved to and fro, according to
the season, across what is now the shallow bed of
the North Sea and the Straits of Dover dry-shod,
for it was then an old land-surface even up to the
coast of Yorkshire and down to the Channel
Islands.
The gigantic Irish deer, a great variety of the
red-deer, and the Norway elk, the musk ox, and
the Saiga antelope were also indigenes, with the
lemming and the tailless hare. Hippopotami
wallowed in the Thames and the Cam, and were
common around our coast, and went north even
as far as Leeds in Yorkshire. The greater beaver
(the Trogontherium) had his home here also, and
rhinoceroses were likewise quite common inhabit-
ants.
We thus see that our forest has not only its
recent and its ancient history, but its pre-history
taking us back to periods so distant that we are
compelled to abandon Time's hour-glass, which,
like the compass at the magnetic north, has ceased
to act as a reliable guide, and we are left stranded
on the banks of quaternary rivers flowing into
prehistoric seas where time records and nautical
almanacs are alike unknown.