But as the land rose, and grew warmer too, while it rose, the wild beasts who had been driven out by the great drowning came gradually back again.

As the bottom of the old icy sea turned into dry land, and got covered with grasses, and weeds, and shrubs once more, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, oxen--sometimes the same species, sometimes slightly different ones--returned to France, and then to England (for there was no British Channel then to stop them); and with them came other strange animals, especially the great Irish elk, as he is called, as large as the largest horse, with horns sometimes ten feet across.

A pair of those horns with the skull you have seen yourself, and can judge what a noble animal he must have been.

Enormous bears came too, and hyaenas, and a tiger or lion (I cannot say which), as large as the largest Bengal tiger now to be seen in India.
And in those days--we cannot, of course, exactly say when--there came--first I suppose into the south and east of France, and then gradually onward into England and Scotland and Ireland--creatures without any hair to keep them warm, or scales to defend them, without horns or tusks to fight with, or teeth to worry and bite; the weakest you would have thought of the beasts, and yet stronger than all the animals, because they were Men, with reasonable souls.

Whence they came we cannot tell, nor why; perhaps from mere hunting after food, and love of wandering and being independent and alone.