fpo On the Fossil' Bo7ie^ '■ 



lerius, and others whom I have consuUed, do notspeak at 

 all of this kind of fossil. 



There is ncvcrlheless in the Museum Beslerianum, plate 

 XXXI, a piece of the fossil tooth of a wild boar, under 

 the singular name o'i pscudo-coroua-augiuna ; and Grew 

 says that the cabinet of the Royal Society of London has 

 similar specimens : but neither of these authors assigns the 

 origin or the species. 



M. Delannay, in his Memolre sur VOrigive des Fossiles 

 accideiiteU des Provinces Belgiques, p. 36, relates, that in the. 

 environs of Alost,on digging into a moss, *' they found the 

 osseous part of a wild hoar unknown in Europe, and they 

 considered what must have been the extraordinary size 

 of the animal when alive.'* He adds, that what made the 

 animal be recognized, " were the luhks, of a length in every 

 respect astonishing.'' It would have been very easy to 

 have added the length of these tusks, and some figure or 

 description of this head. But geologists have rarely de- 

 scended to what they considered as minutiae, and prtterred 

 spending their tin^e in contriving; systems, to employing 

 it in accurate researches : thus the above fact, which might 

 have been made interesting, is totally useless. 



For my part, I have some teeth of wild boars which 

 seem to, have remained long in the earth. I have some 

 also stained black by the moss in which they certainly had 

 been immersed ; but I am not acquainted with the precise 

 origin of any of them, except of a tusk found on digging 

 the foundations of the bridge of Jena, opposite the Military 

 School, with several bones of horses, pieces of boats, 

 and other artificial fragments. I have also a piece of a 

 jaw brought from the mosses in the department of the 

 Oise, deposited in the cabinet of the School of Mines. Both 

 are therefore of very recent strata, and they do not differ iii 

 the least from the living analogy. 



Adrian Cainper sent me the drawing of the lower half of 

 the humerus of a hog or a wild boar, wliich had been trans- 

 mitted to him from Hartz, but as to its precise position he 

 knows nothing certain. 



The head of the Sus genus is so easily distinguished from 

 all others, that we have no occasion to give its' characters. 



Its grinders represent on a small scale those of the masto- 

 dontus with straight teeth, having also blunt tubercles 

 furnished on their edges with smaller tubercles. 



In the wild boar, domestic pigs, Siam pigs, and Mada- 

 gascar wild boars, the natural and complete number of 

 grinders is seven. 



The 



