Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ON THE ZOOLOGY OF ANCIENT EUEOPE, The subject to which I invite your attention this evening, possesses, I trust, an interest of its own sufficient to warrant me in bringing it to your notice. Were it otherwise and depending alone upon my powers to render it worthy of consideration, I should hesitate long before I ventured to obtrude it upon the Philosophical Society of the University of Cambridge. As it is, I have no small fear lest the theme should suffer in my hands, and I must therefore crave your utmost indulgence while making some remarks on the Zoology of Ancient Europe. Many of those whom I have the honour to address, may probably, at some time or other, have been led to speculate on what must have been the condition and appearance of this quarter of the globe at the period when the rude ancestors of its present civilized inhabitants first explored its bleak mountains, its trackless forests, its wilds " immeasurably spread," and its waters hitherto undisturbed by the plashing oar or the cleaving prow all of which, either through our own actual observation or the accounts of others, are now so familiar to us. I shall not try to depict to your imagination the probable aspect even of the natural features of primitive Europe though these, in all likelihood, have not undergone much alteration, still less shall I attempt a complete description of the wild animals, its ancient denizens; for I believe that as yet the materials do not exist from which to form anything like a perfect picture of that remote age. I can only pretend to touch upon a few salient points, on which light has been already thrown. But before I proceed further, I must state the limits within which I intend to confine my present remarks. In the first place, I wish to treat the subject the Zoology of ...