This last period of the Tertiary epoch was marked, in some parts of
Europe, by great movements of the terrestrial crust, always due to the
same cause--namely, the continual and gradual cooling of the globe. This
leads us to recall what we have repeatedly stated, that this cooling,
during which the outer zone of the fluid mass passed to the solid state,
produced irregularities and inequalities in the external surface,
sometimes accompanied by fractures through which the semi-fluid or pasty
matter poured itself; leading afterwards to the upheaval of mountain
ranges through these gaping chasms. Thus, during the Pliocene period,
many mountains and mountain-chains were formed in Europe by basaltic and
volcanic eruptions. These upheavals were preceded by sudden and
irregular movements of the elastic mass of the crust--by earthquakes, in
short--phenomena which have been already sufficiently explained.
* * * * *
In order to understand the nature of the vegetation of the period, as
compared with that with which we are familiar, let us listen to M.
Lecoq: “Arrived, finally,” says that author, “at the last period which
preceded our own epoch--the epoch in which the temperate zones were
still embellished by tropical forms of vegetation, which were, however,
slowly declining, driven out as it were by a cooling climate and by the
invasion of more vigorous species--great terrestrial commotions took
place: mountains are covered with eternal snow; continents now take
their present forms; but many great lakes, now dried up, still existed;
great rivers flowed majestically through smiling countries, whose
surface man had not yet come to modify.
“Two hundred and twelve species compose this rich flora, in which the
Ferns of the earlier ages of the world are scarcely indicated, where the
Palms seem to have quite disappeared, and we see forms much more like
those which are constantly under our observation. The _Culmites
arundinaceus_ (Unger) abounds near the water, where also grows the
_Cyperites tertiarius_ (Unger), where floats _Dotamogeton geniculatus_
(Braun), and where we see submerged _Isoctites Brunnii_ (Unger). Great
Conifers still form the forests. This fine family has, as we have seen,
passed through every epoch, and still presents us with its elegant forms
and persistent evergreen foliage; _Taxodites_, _Thuyoxylum_,
_Abietites_, _Pinites_, _Eleoxylon_, and _Taxites_ being still the forms
most abundant in these old natural forests.
“The predominating character of this period is the abundance of the
group of the Amentaceæ; whilst the Conifers are thirty-two in number, of
the other we reckon fifty-two species, among which are many European
genera, such as _Alnus_; _Quercus_, the oak; _Salix_, the willow;
_Fagus_, the beech; _Betula_, the birch, &c.
“The following families constitute the arborescent flora of the period
besides those already mentioned:--Balsaminaceæ, Lauraceæ, Thymelæaceæ,
Santalaceæ, Cornaceæ, Myrtaceæ, Calycanthaceæ, Pomaceæ, Rosaceæ,
Amygdaleæ, Leguminosæ, Anacardiaceæ, Juglandaceæ, Rhamnaceæ,
Celastrinaceæ, Sapindaceæ, Meliaceæ, Aceraceæ, Tiliaceæ, Magnoliaceæ,
Capparidaceæ, Sapoteaceæ, Styracaceæ, Oleaceæ, Juncaceæ, Ericaceæ.
“In all these families great numbers of European genera are found, often
even more abundant in species than now. Thus, as Brongniart observes, in
this flora we reckon fourteen species of Maple; three species of Oak;
and these species proceed from two or three very circumscribed
localities, which would not probably, at the present time, represent in
a radius of several leagues more than three or four species of these
genera.”
An important difference distinguishes the Pliocene flora, as compared
with those of preceding epochs, it is the absence of the family of Palms
in the European flora, as noted by Lecoq, which forms such an essential
botanical feature in the Miocene period. We mention this, because, in
spite of the general analogy which exists between the vegetation of the
Pliocene period and that of temperate regions in the present day, it
does not appear that there is a single species of the former period
absolutely identical with any one now growing in Europe. Thus, the
European vegetation, even at the most recent geological epoch, differs
specifically from the vegetation of our age, although a general
resemblance is observable between the two.
[Illustration: Fig. 174.--Skeleton of the Mastodon of Turin.]
The terrestrial animals of the Pliocene period present us with a great
number of creatures alike remarkable from their proportions and from
their structure. The Mammals and the batrachian Reptiles are alike
deserving of our attention in this epoch. Among the former the Mastodon,
which makes its first appearance in the Miocene formations, continues
to be found, but becomes extinct apparently before we reach the upper
beds. Others present themselves of genera totally unknown till now, some
of them, such as the _Hippopotamus_, the _Camel_, the _Horse_, the _Ox_,
and the _Deer_, surviving to the present day. The fossil horse, of all
animals, is perhaps that which presents the greatest resemblance to
existing individuals; but it was small, not exceeding the ass in size.
[Illustration: Fig. 175.--Head of Rhinoceros tichorhinus, partly
restored under the direction of Eugene Deslongchamps.]
The _Mastodon_, which we have considered in our description of the
preceding period, still existed in Pliocene times; in Fig. 174 the
species living in this latter age is represented--it is called the
Mastodon of Turin. As we see, it has only two projecting tusks or
defences in the upper jaw, instead of four, like the American species,
which is described in page 343. Other species belonging to this period
are not uncommon; the portion of an upper jaw-bone with a tooth which
was found in the Norwich Crag at Postwick, near Norwich, Dr. Falconer
has shown to be a Pliocene species, first observed in Auvergne, and
named by Messrs. Croizet and Jobert, its discoverers, _Mastodon
Arvernensis_.
The _Hippopotamus_, _Tapir_, and _Camel_, which appear during the
Pliocene period, present no peculiar characteristics to arrest our
attention.
The Apes begin to abound in species; the Stags were already numerous.
The _Rhinoceros_, which made its appearance in the Miocene period,
appears in greater numbers in the Pliocene deposits. The species
peculiar to the Tertiary epoch is _R. tichorhinus_, which is descriptive
of the bony partition which separated its two nostrils, an anatomical
arrangement which is not found in our existing species. Two horns
surmount the nose of this animal, as represented in Fig. 175. Two living
species, namely, the Rhinoceros of Africa and Sumatra, have two horns,
but they are much smaller than those of _R. tichorhinus_. The existing
Indian Rhinoceros has only one horn.
The body of _R. tichorhinus_ was covered with very thick hair, and its
skin was without the rough and callous scales which we remark on the
skin of the living African species.
Contemporaneously with this gigantic species there existed a dwarf
species about the size of our Hog; and along with it several
intermediate species, whose bones are found in sufficient numbers to
enable us to reconstruct the skeleton. The curvature of the nasal bone
of the fossil Rhinoceros and its gigantic horn have given rise to many
tales and popular legends. The famous bird, the _Roc_, which played so
great a part in the fabulous myths of the people of Asia, originated in
the discovery in the bosom of the earth of the cranium and horns of a
fossil Rhinoceros. The famous dragons of western tradition have a
similar origin.
In the city of Klagenfurth, in Carinthia, is a fountain on which is
sculptured the head of a monstrous dragon with six feet, and a head
surmounted by a stout horn. According to the popular tradition still
prevalent at Klagenfurth, this dragon lived in a cave, whence it issued
from time to time to frighten and ravage the country. A bold cavalier
kills the dragon, paying with his life for this proof of his courage. It
is the same legend which is current in every country, from that of the
valiant St. George and the Dragon and of St. Martha, who nearly about
the same age conquered the fabulous _Tarasque_ of the city of Languedoc,
which bears the name of Tarascon.
But at Klagenfurth the popular legend has happily found a
mouth-piece--the head of the pretended dragon, killed by the valorous
knight, is preserved in the Hôtel de Ville, and this head has furnished
the sculptor for his fountain with a model for the head of his statue.
Herr Unger, of Vienna, recognised at a glance the cranium of the fossil
Rhinoceros; its discovery in some cave had probably originated the fable
of the knight and the dragon. And all legends are capable of some such
explanation when we can trace them back to their sources, and reason
upon the circumstances on which they are founded.
The traveller Pallas gives a very interesting account of a _Rhinoceros
tichorhinus_ which he saw, with his own eyes, taken out of the ice in
which its skin, hair, and flesh had been preserved. It was in December,
1771, that the body of the Rhinoceros was observed buried in the frozen
sand upon the banks of the Viloui, a river which discharges itself into
the Lena below Yakutsk, in Siberia, in 64° north latitude. “I ought to
speak,” the learned naturalist says, “of an interesting discovery which
I owe to the Chevalier de Bril. Some Yakouts hunting this winter near
the Viloui found the body of a large unknown animal. The Sieur Ivan
Argounof, inspector of the Zimovic, had sent on to Irkutsk the head and
a fore and hind foot of the animal, all very well preserved.” The Sieur
Argounof, in his report, states that the animal was half buried in the
sand; it measured as it lay three ells and three-quarters Russian in
length, and he estimated its height at three and a half; the animal,
still retaining its flesh, was covered with skin which resembled tanned
leather; but it was so decomposed that he could only remove the fore and
hind foot and the head, which he sent to Irkutsk, where Pallas saw them.
“They appeared to me at first glance,” he says, “to belong to a
Rhinoceros; the head especially was quite recognisable, since it was
covered with its leathery skin, and the skin had preserved all its
external characters, and many short hairs. The eyelids had even escaped
total decay, and in the cranium here and there, under the skin, I
perceived some matter which was evidently the remains of putrefied
flesh. I also remarked in the feet the remains of the tendons and
cartilages where the skin had been removed. The head was without its
horn, and the feet without hoofs. The place of the horn, and the raised
skin which had surrounded it, and the division which existed in both the
hind and fore feet, were evident proofs of its being a Rhinoceros. In a
dissertation addressed to the Academy of St. Petersburg, I have given a
full account of this singular discovery. I give there reasons which
prove that a Rhinoceros had penetrated nearly to the Lena, in the most
northern regions, and which have led to the discovery of the remains of
other strange animals in Siberia. I shall confine myself here to a
description of the country where these curious remains were found, and
to the cause of their long preservation.
“The country watered by the Viloui is mountainous; all the
stratification of these mountains is horizontal. The beds consist of
selenitic and calcareous schists and beds of clay, mixed with numerous
beds of pyrites. On the banks of the Viloui we meet with coal much
broken; probably coal-beds exist higher up near to the river. The brook
Kemtendoï skirts a mountain entirely formed of selenite or crystallised
sulphate of lime and of rock-salt, and this mountain of alabaster is
more than 300 versts (about 200 miles), in ascending the Viloui, from
the place where the Rhinoceros was found. Opposite to the place we see,
near the river, a low hill, about a hundred feet high, which, though
sandy, contains some beds of millstone. The body of the Rhinoceros had
been buried in coarse gravelly sand near this hill, and the nature of
the soil, which is always frozen, had preserved it. The soil near the
Viloui never thaws to a great depth, for, although the rays of the sun
soften the soil to the depth of two yards in the more elevated sandy
places, in the valleys, where the soil is half sand and half clay, it
remains frozen at the end of summer half an ell below the surface.
Without this intense cold the skin of the animal and many parts of it
would long since have perished. The animal could only have been
transported from some southern country to the frozen north at the epoch
of the Deluge, for the most ancient chronicles speak of no changes of
the globe more recent, to which we could attribute the deposit of these
remains and of the bones of elephants which are found dispersed all over
Siberia.”[92]
[92] “Pallas’s Voyage,” vol. iv., pp. 130-134.
In this extract the author refers to a memoir previously published by
himself, in the “Commentarii” of the Academy of St. Petersburg. This
memoir, written in Latin, and entitled “Upon some Animals of Siberia,”
has never been translated. After some general considerations, the author
thus relates the circumstances attending the discovery of the fossil
Rhinoceros, with some official documents affirming their correctness,
and the manner in which the facts were brought under his notice by the
Governor of Irkutsk, General Bril: “The skin and tendons of the head and
feet still preserved considerable flexibility, imbued as it were with
humidity from the earth; but the flesh exhaled a fetid ammoniacal odour,
resembling that of a latrine. Compelled to cross the Baïkal Lake before
the ice broke up, I could neither draw up a sufficiently careful
description nor make sketches of the parts of the animal; but I made
them place the remains, without leaving Irkutsk, upon a furnace, with
orders that after my departure they should be dried by slow degrees and
with the greatest care, continuing the process for some time, because
the viscous matter which incessantly oozed out could only be dissipated
by great heat. It happened, unfortunately, that during the operation the
posterior part of the upper thigh and the foot were burnt in the
overheated furnace, and they were thrown away; the head and the
extremity of the hind foot only remained intact and undamaged by the
process of drying. The odour of the softer parts, which still contained
viscous matter in their interior, was changed by the desiccation into
one resembling that of flesh decomposed in the sun.
“The Rhinoceros to which the members belonged was neither large for its
species nor advanced in age, as the bones of the head attest, yet it
was evidently an adult from the comparison made of the size of the
cranium as compared with that of others of the same species more aged,
which were afterwards found in a fossil state in divers parts of
Siberia. The entire length of the head from the upper part of the nape
of the neck to the extremity of the denuded bone of the jaw was thirty
inches; the horns were not with the head, but we could still see evident
vestiges of two horns, the nasal and frontal. The front, unequal and a
little protuberant between the orbits, and of a rhomboidal egg-shape, is
deficient in the skin, and only covered by a light horny membrane,
bristling with straight hairs as hard as horn.
“The skin which covers the greater part of the head is in the dried
state, a tenacious, fibrous substance, like curried leather, of a
brownish-black on the outside and white in the inside; when burnt, it
had the odour of common leather; the mouth, in the place where the lips
should have been soft and fleshy, was putrid and much lacerated; the
extremities of the maxillary bone were bare. Upon the left side, which
had probably been longest exposed to the air, the skin was here and
there decomposed and rubbed on the surface; nevertheless, the greater
part of the mouth was so well preserved on the right side that the
pores, or little holes from which doubtless the hairs had fallen, were
still visible all over that side, and even in front. In the right side
of the jaw there were still in certain places numerous hairs grouped in
tufts, for the most part rubbed down to the roots, and here and there of
two or three lines still retaining their full length. They stand erect,
are stiff, and of an ashy colour, but with one or two black, and a
little stiffer than the others, in each bunch.
“What was most astonishing, however, was the fact that the skin which
covered the orbits of the eyes, and formed the eyelids, was so well
preserved and so healthy that the openings of the eyelids could be seen,
though deformed and scarcely penetrable to the finger; the skin which
surrounded the orbits, though desiccated, formed circular furrows. The
cavities of the eyes were filled with matter, either argillaceous or
animal, such as still occupied a part of the cavity of the cranium.
Under the skin the fibres and tendons still remained, and above all the
remains of the temporal muscles; finally, in the throat hung some great
bundles of muscular fibres. The denuded bones were young and less solid
than in other fossil crania of the same species. The bone which gave
support to the nasal horn was not yet attached to the _vomer_; it was
unprovided with articulations like the processes of the young bones. The
extremities of the jaws preserved no vestige either of teeth or
sockets, but they were covered here and there with the remains of the
integument. The first molar was distant about four inches from the
extreme edge of the jaw.
“The foot which remains to me, and which, if I am not mistaken, belongs
to the left hind limb, has not only preserved its skin quite intact and
furnished with hairs, or their roots, as well as the tendons and
ligaments of the heel in all their strength, but also the skin itself
quite whole as far as the bend in the knee. The place of the muscles was
filled with black mud. The extremity of the foot is cloven into three
angles, the bony parts of which, with the periosteum, still remain here
and there; the horny hoofs had been detached. The hairs adhering in many
places to the skin were from one to three lines in length, tolerably
stiff and ash-coloured. What remains of it proves that the foot was
covered with bunches of hair, which hung down.
“We have never, so far as I know, observed so much hair on any
rhinoceros which has been brought to Europe in our times, as appears to
have been presented by the head and feet we have described. I leave you
then to decide if our rhinoceros of the Lena was born or not in the
temperate climate of Central Asia. In fact, the rhinoceros, as I gather
from the relations of travellers, belongs to the forests of Northern
India; and it is likely enough that these animals differ in a more hairy
skin from those which live in the burning zones of Africa, just in the
same way that other animals of a hotter climate are less warmly covered
than those of the same genera in temperate countries.”[93]
[93] “Commentarii Academiæ Petersburgicæ,” p. 3.
Of all fossil ruminants one of the largest and most singular is the
_Sivatherium_, whose remains have been found in the valley of Murkunda,
in the Sewalik branch of the Sub-Himalayan Mountains. Its name is taken
from that of Siva, the Indian deity worshipped in that part of India.
The _Sivatherium giganteum_ had a body as bulky as that of an ox, and
bore a sort of resemblance to the living Elk. It combined in itself the
characteristics of different kinds of Herbivores, at the same time that
it was marked by individual peculiarities. The massive head possessed
four deciduous, hollow horns, like the Prongbuck; two front ones
conical, smooth, and rapidly rising to a point, and two hinder ones of
larger size, and branched, projected forward above the eyes.[94] Thus it
differed from the deer, whose solid horns annually drop off, and from
the antelope tribe, sheep and oxen, whose hollow horns are persistent,
and resembled only one living ruminant, the prongbuck, in having had
hollow horns subject to shedding. Fig. 176 is a representation of the
_Sivatherium_ restored, in so far, at least, as it is possible to do so
in the case of an animal of which only the cranium and a few other bones
have been discovered.
[94] Dr. James Murie, _Geological Magazine_, vol. viii., p. 438.
[Illustration: Fig. 176.--Sivatherium restored.]
As if to rival these gigantic Mammals, great numbers of Reptiles seem to
have lived in the Pliocene period, although they are no longer of the
same importance as in the Secondary epoch. Only one of these, however,
need occupy our attention, it is the _Salamander_. The living
Salamanders are amphibious Batrachians, with smooth skins, and rarely
attaining the length of twenty inches. The Salamander of the Tertiary
epoch had the dimensions of a Crocodile; and its discovery opens a
pregnant page in the history of geology. The skeleton of this Reptile
was long considered to be that of a human victim of the deluge, and was
spoken of as “_homo diluvii testis_.” It required all the efforts of
Camper and Cuvier to eradicate this error from the minds of the learned,
and probably in the minds of the vulgar it survived them both.
Upon the left bank of the Rhine, not far from Constance, a little above
Stein, and near the village of Œningen, in Switzerland, there are some
fine quarries of schistose limestone. In consequence of their varied
products these quarries have often been described by naturalists; they
are of Tertiary age, and were visited, among others, by Horace de
Saussure, by whom they are described in the third volume of his “Voyage
dans les Alpes.”
In 1725, a large block of stone was found, incrusted in which a skeleton
was discovered, remarkably well preserved; and Scheuchzer, a Swiss
naturalist of some celebrity, who added to his scientific pursuits the
study of theology, was called upon to give his opinion as to the nature
of this relic of ancient times. He thought he recognised in the skeleton
that of a man. In 1726 he published a description of these fossil
remains in the “Philosophical Transactions” of London; and in 1731 he
made it the subject of a special dissertation, entitled “_Homo diluvii
testis_”--Man, a witness of the Deluge. This dissertation was
accompanied by an engraving of the skeleton. Scheuchzer returned to the
subject in another of his works, “Physica Sacra,” saying: “It is certain
that this schist contains the half, or nearly so, of the skeleton of a
man; that the substance even of the bones, and, what is more, of the
flesh and of parts still softer than the flesh, are there incorporated
in the stone; in a word, it is one of the rarest relics which we have of
that accursed race which was buried under the waters. The figure shows
us the contour of the frontal bone, the orbits with the openings which
give passage to the great nerves of the fifth pair. We see there the
remains of the brain, of the sphenoidal bone, of the roots of the nose,
a notable fragment of the maxillary bone, and some vestiges of the
liver.”