Mastodontoid Pachyderm in Australia. 1 1 



will, perhaps, be best consulted by refraining from the im- 

 position of any generic or specific name until the requisite 

 characters are obtained ; and of this most desirable acquisition 

 reasonable hopes may be entertained, since the zealous and 

 distinguished officer to whom we are indebted for all the in- 

 teresting fossils yet met with in Australia promises a con- 

 tinuance of his valuable aid. At the conclusion of his letter 

 Sir T. L. Mitchell states, " I am promised part of a rib and 

 other bones by the gentleman who gave the tooth, and I 

 have some hopes of obtaining a jaw-bone ; when I do, it shall 

 be sent to you forthwith." 



The fossils above described will be presented, in the name 

 of Sir T. L. Mitchell, to the Museum of the Royal College 

 of Surgeons, London. They cannot be contemplated without 

 suggesting many interesting reflections. They tell us plainly 

 that the time was when Australia's arid plains were trodden 

 by the hoofs of heavy Pachyderms ; but could the land then 

 have been, as now, parched by long-continued droughts, 

 with dry river-courses containing here and there a pond of 

 water ? All the facts and analogies which throw light on the 

 habits of the extinct Mastodons and Dinotheres, indicate these 

 creatures to have been frequenters of marshes, swamps, or 

 lakes. Other relations of land and sea than now characterize 

 the southern hemisphere, a different condition of the surface 

 of the land and of the meteoric influences governing the pro- 

 portion and distribution of fresh water on that surface, may, 

 therefore, be conjectured to have prevailed, when huge Mas- 

 todontoid Pachyderms constituted part of the quadruped- 

 population of Australia. May not the change from a more 

 humid climate to the present peculiarly dry one have been the 

 cause or chief cause of the extinction of such Pachyderms ? 

 Was not the ancient terra australis, when so populated, of 

 greater extent than the present insular continent ? 



The mutual dependences between large mammalian quadru- 

 peds, and other members of the animal kingdom, suggest other 

 reflections in connexion with the present fossil. If the extinct 

 species ever so abounded as to require its redundancy to be 

 suppressed by a carnivorous enemy, then some destructive 

 species of this kind must have coexisted, of larger dimensions 

 than the extinct Dasyurus laniarius, — the ancient destroyer of 

 the now equally extinct gigantic kangaroos, Macropus Titan, 

 &c, whose remains were discovered in the bone-caves of Wel- 

 lington Valley. Extremely few coprophagous beetles have 

 hitherto, I believe, been found in Australia, and the scarcity of 

 such is readily explained by the absence of native species of 

 large herbivorous mammals ; but the dung of the Mastodon^ 



