ceros, with 3 very large elephants' tusks, and some stags' horns. More lately at Lawton near the same village of Rugby, several other bones of rhinoceros were discovered in diluvium. In 1817, Sir Everard Home read to the Royal Society an interesting memoir on fossil bones of rhinoceros found by Mr. Whitby at Oreston near Plymouth, in a limestone cavern, 160 feet deep, in the solid rock. The proper mouth of that cavern, which was 45 feet long, had been probably filled up by the convulsions of the deluge. Here teeth, vertebræ, and other bones, belonging to 3 individuals, were found. Some rhinoceros' bones have also been detected in the caves of Kirkdale and Wirksworth, of the Crawley rocks near Swansea, and Paviland. To the above must be added, the bones found in Ava.

From a comparison of the whole facts, M. Cuvier concludes, that a large unknown species of rhinoceros, is found in a great number of places in Europe and Asia; the integrity of whose bones indicates that they have not been transported from a distance, but have been buried by a sudden revolution of the

globe, which has destroyed the whole species. Its

size was nearly the same with that of the living

ELASMOTHERIUM AND ANCIENT HORSE.

541

rhinoceros. But there were 3 other fossil species; one of them much smaller, not equalling the tapir in size.

V. The Elasmotherium.—This is a genus of fossil animal of Siberia, discovered and described by M. Gothelf de Fischer, aulic counsellor of the emperor of Russia, and Professor at Moscow. Its teeth are very peculiar, showing its diet to have been more completely graminivorous than that of the rhinoceros; and more similar in this respect to the elephant and the horse. M. Cuvier considers it as forming an intermediate link between the horse and rhinoceros, but of the size of the latter. It had, probably, the aspect of a gigantic horse; and is thought by M. Cuvier to have been an astonishing animal.

VI. Fossil Horse.-The bones of this animal are almost as common in the diluvial strata as those of any other of the larger species; but they have been hitherto little attended to in the works on fossil remains. There are thousands of horses' teeth in the celebrated deposit of bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, tigers, and hyænas, discovered in 1700, near Canstadt in Wirtemberg. A similar assemblage was recently discovered at Thiede near Wolfenbüttel; at Fouvent in France; in the Val d'Arno; in the caves of Kirkdale, Mendip, Clifton, and Plymouth, and Paviland in England; in diluvial loam, near Oxford, Walton, and Lawford. M. Cuvier says he has been always struck with the fact that the really fossil-horse bones never attain to the magnitude of those of our great horses; remaining usually at the middle size of zebras and large

asses.

He concludes that a species of the genus horse, served as a faithful companion to the elephants and the other animals of the same epoch, whose remains are now numerously scattered among the diluvial beds; and that there is no very marked difference between its bones and those of our living breeds.

VII. The daman, the tapir, and the rhinoceros, possess great osteological affinities, as well as the skeleton of the horse; but their differences are such as to allow of intermediate genera. These intervals, these chasms now left in the series, appear to have been anciently filled up by genera, of which nothing but the fossil remains are known to us; but whose teeth, feet, and other characteristic organs lean in part to the one, and in part to the other set of animals; yet differing from them as a whole.

Thus we find in the environs of Paris and elsewhere, the genus of the paleotheriums, which resemble the tapirs in their incisor and canine teeth, and especially in having nasal bones adapted to bear a proboscis; but with grinders like those of the rhinoceros and the daman.

In the same locality we observe the genus anoplotherium, which has also grinders akin to those of the rhinoceros and daman, the nose-bones of which are formed as in the greater number of quadrupeds; but whose incisor and canine teeth, as well as feet, are disposed in a singular manner in this class of animals. All its teeth form merely one uninterrupted series as in man, and its feet have only two toes like those of ruminants, without having their metatarsal and metacarpal bones united into one

FOSSIL TAPIRS AND LOPHIODONS.

543,

body (canon) as they are in the above family. Among these various exuviæ we may discover some which appear to resemble the tapir more than any other genera, by the transverse and almost straight hillocks (collines) which stand in relief on several of their grinders; which M. Cuvier classes under the head of

VIII. Gigantic fossil tapirs.-Most of the bones referred by M. Cuvier to this genus have been found at Comminge near the river Louze and at Chevilly in France. He considers one species of this animal to have been 18 feet long, and 11 high, which makes it equal to elephants, and to the great American mastodon. Other individuals, those of Carlat and Chevilly must have been a little less; but they were still very formidable animals. It would appear that these gigantic tapirs date from the same epoch as the fossil mastodons and elephants; that they lived along with them, and were destroyed by the same catastrophe, since their bones are found in the same diluvium, and sometimes as at Chevilly and Avaray mingled pele-mele with theirs.

IX. Fossil lophiodons.*-This is a genus of animals akin to the tapirs by their incisor and canine teeth, and by their size; but whose anterior and posterior grinders present some differences.

It

is doubtful if these animal remains belong to the diluvial detritus. M. Cuvier thinks that they should be referred to the superior regular strata, and are therefore of a prior date to the fossil elephants, mastodons, &c. Many of them have been found

*From the Greek; hillock-formed or crested teeth.

near the village of Issel, along the slopes of the Montagne-Noire, department of Aude, impasted in a very hard kind of pudding-stone, or alluvial sandstone, composed of siliceous grains of different colours, rolled and irregularly rounded, and bound together by a calcareous cement. A great portion of the bones were mutilated, and a greater number still had been rolled before being incrusted. Some are dyed black, others dun, and others a beautiful violet. Besides the bones of lophiodons, and paleotheriums, there have been extracted from that breccia, bones of crocodiles, bones of large turtles, probably of the genus emydes, and incontestible bones of the trionyx or soft turtle; circumstances the more remarkable as these different genera accompany one another almost constantly in the localities where they have left their exuviæ. The lophiodons occur very numerously in these recent conglomerates.

Their generic characters consist:

1. In 6 incisors and two canine teeth in each jaw; 7 molares or grinders on each side in the upper jaw, and 6 in the under, with a vacant space between the canine and the first molaris; points in which they resemble the tapirs.

2. In a third crest on the last under molaris ; which is wanting in the tapirs.

3. In the anterior grinders of the lower jaw having no transverse hillocks as in the tapirs, but presenting a longitudinal series of tubercles, or one insulated conical tubercle.

4. In the superior grinders having their transverse crests more oblique, thereby akin to the rhinoceros,