482 Br. Falconer on Cuvier's Laws of Correlation^ 



every one of the conditions set forth as involved in it. The 

 Bears are heavy cumbrous animals ; their teeth are not purely 

 carnivorous, but mixed* j their feet are plantigrade ; and their 

 habit of diet, when they are regarded in the mass, is omnivorous. 

 We have known the same species, a brown bear, to browse on 

 young grass like an ox ; to devour the flesh of a slaughtered 

 deer left in the forest ; and to kill and eat a tame pheasant that 

 came within its reach. Nature has given mixed teeth, and a 

 mixed organization throughout, to match the mixed habits of 

 the genus. Technically they are ranked, in some classifications, 

 as among the Carnivora; but competent naturalists divide the 

 order of Ferce into three groups, excluding the Bears and their 

 allies, under the designation oi Plantigrada, from the Carnivora, 

 which comprise the digitigrade Dogs, Cats, Hyaenas, &c. How 

 then is Mr. Huxley warranted in asserting, that the Bears were 

 '* the case of Cuvier's own selection " ? In every demonstration 

 of a subject, and in ordinary instruction, we select the simplest 

 problems ; and having mastered them, we next proceed to the 

 more complicated or mixed. Cuvier took the pure and simple 

 case : Mr. Huxley fixes upon him the mixed. 



Let us now take the case as put by Mr. Huxley, and suppose 

 that the brown and white bears were only met with in the fossil 

 state; but with the proviso of the other living species being 

 known to us as at present. The comparative anatomist would, 

 we believe, be led to infer that the polar bear had been more car- 

 nivorous than the brown bear, and the latter more of a vegetable 

 feeder than the former. The polar bear differs more from all 

 the other bears in the form of the skull, than these do from one 

 another ; and the differences are all in the direction of a more 

 carnassial type. In proof that this is not a rash or unguarded 

 assertion, it can be shown that comparative anatomists have not 

 hesitated, in the cases of certain extinct fossil bears, to form 

 conclusions as to their habits of diet upon the osteological evi- 

 dence. Thus : " From the greater proportional size and more 

 complicated tubercular surface of the posterior molar teeth, espe- 

 cially in the upper jaw, and from the greater complication on 

 the crown of the smallest persistent molar in the lower jaw, one 

 might be led to suppose that the Ursus spelaus fed more on 

 vegetables than the grisly bear does ^' (Owen, Brit. Foss. Mamm. 

 p. 101). The evidence furnished by the skull confirms this 

 guarded inference : it deviates widely in form from that of the 

 polar bear. Again : " The above remarkable modification of 

 the crowns of the molar teeth of the lower jaw, indicates this 

 great extinct bear (of the Sewalik Hills) to have been more car- 



* Their molar teeth generally manifest in both jaws a tuberculate 

 grinding surface. Owen, Odontog. vol. i. p. 501. 



