here promiscuously mingled. To the north of the Appennines likewise the same fossil remains are abundantly found; and indeed scarcely any district of Italy seems to be without them. They occur in many parts of France, the Netherlands, Holland, Germany, particularly at Caustadt and Tonna on the Necker, where a whole forest of the trunks of palm trees lies buried. A remarkable congeries of fossil elephants' bones was discovered at Thiede near Wolfenbuttle, mixed with bones of rhinoceros, horse, ox, and stag. There were 11 elephant tusks, one of them 14 feet 8 inches long, bent into a perfect semicircle; and about 30 grinders. An entire skull was dug out of the soil, at Osterode at the foot of the Hartz mountains opposite Göttingen, along with bones of the rhinoceros. On the banks of the Elbe also, and in Bohemia, many such bones are found, nay even in Scandinavia and in Iceland.

In England, the teeth, tusks, and bones of elephants of prodigious size have been found in diluvium in Robin Hood's bay, near Whitby; at Scarborough ; Bridlington, and several other places along the shore of Holderness; as also in the interior of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex. Near Harwich, at Walton, in a mass of diluvial clay, between high and low water mark, there was a large deposit of them, mixed with bones of the hippopotamus, horse, &c. On the banks of the Thames they are extremely common; as at Sheppey, the isle of Dogs, Lewisham, London, Brentford, Kew, Hurley Bottom, Wallingford, Dorchester, Abingdon, and Oxford. At Norwich, Canterbury, Chartham near Rochester, Lyme Regis, Charmouth, Abbotsbury, Burton, Loders, near Bridport, near Yeovil in Somerset, at Whitchurch near Dorchester, on Salisbury plain, in the valley of the Avon, in that of the Severn, at Trentham in Staffordshire, and abundantly at Newnham and Lawford near Rugby in Warwickshire. Elephants' teeth and bones are often found in digging foundations and sewers in London, as under 12 feet of gravel in Gray's-Inn Lane, and at a depth of 30 feet on the east of Waterloo-place. At Kingsland near Hoxton, an entire elephant's skull was discovered in 1806, containing 2 tusks of enormous length, as well as the grinders. All the gravel pits round about London seem to afford them. In the gravel pits of Oxford and Abingdon, teeth and tusks and various bones of the elephant, are found mixed with the bones of rhinoceros, horse, ox, hog, and several species of deer; often crowded together in the

FOSSIL AND LIVING ELEPHANTS COMPARED. 521.

same pit, and seldom rolled or rubbed at the edges, although the several bones are not assembled so as to complete a skeleton.*

Wales, Scotland and Ireland have also afforded elephants' tusks or bones.

Blumenbach states in his Archæologia Telluris, published in 1803, that more than two hundred elephants and 30 rhinoceroses, had been found in Germany. Many have been discovered since, as the congregated heaps at Seilberg near Canstadt, and at the village of Thiede, contiguous to the town of Brunswick.

Bones of the fossil elephant occur in considerable abundance in North America, where no living elephants have ever been known to exist; and Humboldt found them in the plains of Mexico, and in the province of Quito.

All the above localities belong to the diluvial gravel or loam; but there are many elephants' bones likewise in limestone caves. In England, bones of the fossil elephant have been found in the caverns at Kirkdale, Wirksworth, Mendip, Crawley rocks near Swansea, and Paviland caves near Swansea. And on the continent, in caves in the district of Muggendorf, and at Fouvent in France. A most interesting description of these caverns, with very instructive plates, will be found in Dr. Buckland's work, quoted below.

Comparison of the fossil elephant with the living. There are three distinct species of this genus. 1. The African, which inhabits the Cape, Senegal, and Guinea.

*This enumeration of the English localities is from Professor Buckland's excellent Reliquiæ Diluvianæ, 2d Edition.

It has a rounded skull, large ears, grinding-teeth marked with lozenges in their crown (upper face).

2. The Indian, found on both sides of the Ganges, and in the islands of the Indian seas, as Ceylon, Java, Borneo, Sumatra, &c.

It has an oblong skull, concave front, small ears, and grinders marked with waving ribands.

3. The fossil or primeval elephant (elephas primigenius), mammoth of the Russians. It has an oblong skull, concave front, very long bonesockets of its tusks, lower jaw obtuse, broad parallel grinders, marked with narrowish ribands on the crown.

Its bones are found only in the fossil state; no similar recent ones have ever been seen. The fossil elephant resembles more the Indian than the African species; but differs from the first, in the form, of its grinders, of its under jaw, and several other bones; especially in the length of its tusksockets or alveoli. This latter character must have modified singularly the figure and organisation of its proboscis, and given it a physiognomy much more different from that of the Indian species, than might be inferred from the resemblances of the other bones. Its size (taille) was about that of the Indian, from 8 to 15 or 16 feet; but perhaps it was a little thicker and more squat.

The wood engraving at the top of the following page, is an elephant's tooth, copied exactly from Plate VI. Fig. 1, of the first volume of the Ossemens Fossiles. It seems to have been cracked across by some violence; but it is very characteristic.

The above figure of a fossil tooth represents of the natural size, an under-grinder of an old elephant, found some years ago, along with its fellow, buried 18 feet deep in black earth in the Forest of Bondy, near Paris. It has 24 ribands, or plates of enamel crossing the surface. These fillets are usually narrower in the fossil, than in the living species. Hence the former could have more grinding plates in action at once than the latter can; which are seldom more than 10. The fossil teeth are usually broader than the living in the proportion of about 3 to 2 inches; and their ribands are less festooned.

From its skeleton, M. Cuvier concludes that it differed more from the Indian elephant, than the ass does from the horse, or the jackall and isatis from the wolf and the fox.

The bones must have been interred by some general physical cause; for they are too numerous, and dispersed over too many deserts, and uninhabitable countries, to admit of the supposition of the animals having been conducted thither by men.

Most part of the bones are not at all water-worn, but have their edges, and their processes entire ; showing that they have suffered no kind of friction. The epiphyses of bones which had not acquired their complete growth, still adhere, though the

slightest force would have detached them. The only changes which they have suffered, are due to decomposition produced during their long residence in the earth.

Every thing therefore concurs to show that the elephants which owned the fossil bones, dwelt in the countries, where their remains are now found; and that they disappeared in a revolution which destroyed all the individuals existing at the time. Whatever was the cause, says Cuvier, it must have been sudden. The large bones and ivory tusks so perfectly preserved in the plains of Siberia, must owe their soundness to the cold which suddenly froze them up, or which counteracted the natural decomposing influence of the elements. Had this cold come on by degrees and very slowly, these bones, and a fortiori, the soft parts with which they are still sometimes clothed, would have had time to decompose, as happens to the elephants which now die in hot or temperate countries. Certainly it would have been quite impossible for a whole carcass, such as the one discovered by Mr. Adams, to have preserved its flesh and skin, without corruption, had it not been immediately embalmed in antiseptic ice.

"Thus every hypothesis of a gradual refrigeration of the earth, or a slow variation, either in the inclination, or in the position of the axis of the globe, falls to pieces of itself.”*

Were the actual elephants of India, the descendants of those ancient fossil elephants, which had taken refuge in their present climates from the * Cuvier, Ossemens Fossiles, I. 203.