1865.] OBITUARY — DR. FALCONER. 141 



and on his return home he visited the Holy Land, whence he pro- 

 ceeded along the Syrian coast to Smyrna, Constantinople, and the 

 Crimea, during the siege of Sebastopol. 



Soon after his arrival in England he resumed his palaeontological 

 researches, and in 1857 he communicated to the Geological 

 Society two memoirs " On the Species of Mastodon and Elephant 

 occurring in the Fossil State in England." Having occupied him- 

 self during several years with the special investigation of the mam- 

 malian Fauna of the pliocene, as distinguished from that of the 

 quaternary period of Europe, he was conducted to the examination 

 of the Cave Fauna of England. In 1860 he communicated a 

 memoir on the numerous ossiferous caves of Grower, explored or 

 discovered by his friend, Lieut.-Col. Wood. The existence of 

 Elephas antiquus and Rhinoceros hcemitcechus as members of the 

 Cave Fauna was then for the first time established, and the age of 

 that Fauna precisely defined as posterior to the Boulder Clay, 

 or period of the glacial submergence of England. In 1862^' 

 Dr. Falconer communicated to the British Association at Cambridge 

 an account of Elephas 3IeUtensis, the pigmy fossil elephant of 

 Malta, discovered with other extinct mammals, by his friend, 

 Capt. Spratt, C.B , in the ossiferous cave of Zebbug. This 

 unexpected form presented the Proboscidia in a new light to 

 naturalists. 



For nearly thirty years Dr. Falconer had been engaged more or 

 less with the investigation of a subject which has lately occupied 

 much of the attention both of men o£ science and the educated 

 classes generally, viz. the proof of the, remote antiquity of the 

 human race. In 1833, fossil bones, procured from a great depth 

 in the ancient alluvium of the valley of the Ganges, in Hindostan, 

 were figured and erroneously published as human. The subject 

 attracted considerable attention at the time in India. In 1835, 

 while this interest was still fresh, Dr. Falconer and Capt. Cautley 

 discovered the remains of the sris-antic miocene fossil tortoise 

 of India, which, by its colossal size, realized the mythological con- 

 ception of the tortoise which sustained the world on his back. 

 About the same time, several species of fossil Quadrumana were 

 discovered in the Sewalik Hills, one of which was thought to have 

 exceeded in size the ourang-outang, while another was hardly dis- 

 tinguishable by millemetrical differences from the living ' Hoon- 

 unian' monkey of the Hindoos. Coupling these facts with the 

 occurrence of certain existing species, and of the camel, giraffe, 



