46 Mr. P. J. Selby on some Fossil Remains 



logy, as compared with tlic science in its present advanced state, 

 was in its infancy, and had scarcely estimated the aid it was 

 afterwards to receive from the study of zoology, or the more re- 

 cent science of palasontology, a science which the acute and dis- 

 criminating powers and the philosophic views of an Owen, fol- 

 lowing in the footsteps of the illustrious Cuvier, has so beauti- 

 fully and, I may add, wonderfully carried out and illustrated, 

 bringing into view as it were the perfect forms of creatures be- 

 longing to different epochs, and whose osseous remains have 

 lain buried in various strata of the earth for thousands of years. 

 After a careful inspection of these remains, my attention having 

 been arrested by the size of the horn core, indicating its pos- 

 sessor to have been an animal of much greater bulk than any of 

 our domestic cattle, I had them carefully put away in a situa- 

 tion where they were not likely to be injured or molested. In 

 the course of time, however, the circumstance and the place 

 where the bones were deposited had become so far forgotten, 

 that when my attention at a later period w^as called to palseonto- 

 logical subjects, by the works and writings of Mr. Owen, and 

 still more recently by the papers of Professor Nilsson, contained 

 in the ' Annals of Natural History,^ " On the extinct and existing 

 Bovine Animals of Scandinavia," — it was not till after a long 

 and laborious search that I at last discovered, if I may so express 

 it, the place of the second sepulture of these ancient fossil re- 

 mains. On referring to Owen's * British Fossil Mammals and 

 Birds,' and to the papers before mentioned of Professor Nilsson, 

 and after an attentive comparison of the remains now before 

 you, with the figures and descriptions of the different Bovine 

 animals mentioned by these two eminent palaeontologists, I have 

 little hesitation in considering them to have belonged to that 

 species of the genus Bos, designated by them as the Bos primi- 

 geniuSy the presumed Urus of older writers, — an animal of great 

 bulk, and which, as having its remains associated with those of 

 the Mammoth, Tichorine Bhinoceros, and other fossil animals, 

 must have been contemporaneous with them ; at the same time 

 strong and powerful reasons are adduced by these and other 

 authors to show that, though now extinct, a species with the 

 osseous characteristics of the fossil animal, and of equal bulk, 

 existed within the historic period, or since the creation of man, 

 as remains of such a bovine animal have been found in the most 

 recent deposits in company with those of the existing species of 

 Reindeer and Elk. Nilsson also mentions a skeleton of this spe- 

 cies in the Museum of Lund, which bears on its back, he says, 

 ''the palpable mark of a wound from a javelin;" and he also 

 further infers, from older authors and other authentic sources, 

 that an animal bearing all the features of the fossil Bos primi- 



