144 NATURAL HISTORY ESSAYS 



feet long had ploughed the waves of Eocene seas. 

 Hippopotami had bellowed in the rivers of Britain. 

 The hills of Wales had resounded to the ferocious 

 baying of wild hounds allied to if not identical with 

 the hysena dog of the Cape. Dryopithecus and 

 mastodon, glyptodon and megalonyx had stood for 

 the apes and elephants, the armadillos and sloths 

 of recent times. In short, the bones of all kinds of 

 strange beasts, recovered from pampas and savannah, 

 from tundra and peat bog, were the wonders and 

 trophies of the new learning.^ Reverting to Cuvier's 

 discovery, the quarries of Montmartre, the Paris basin, 

 was a veritable graveyard of mammalian remains — a 

 mine of information, a natural picture gallery or 

 rather museum. Amongst the first animals restored by 

 Cuvier was the Paloeothei'mm magnum, a heavily built 

 beast about the size of a horse. Its skull was re- 

 markable for its short nasal bones and for its archaic 

 number of forty-four teeth ; the skeleton had an 

 elongated neck, and there were three toes on each 

 foot. It may be interesting in this place to conjure 

 up a mental picture of the paloeothere as it lived ages 

 ago in Eocene times, when man was not. 



Scene : a well-watered valley on the present site 

 of Paris. A shallow river, half flood, half marsh, 

 flows slowly between shelving banks, widening here 



1 At the sale of the Leverian Museum in 1806, Lot 53, a "fossil 

 slioulder-blade bone of some lar^'e unknown animal, Shotover Hill" 

 fetclied 16s., and "a most noble specimen of the fossil scull and liorns of 

 the moose deer from Ireland, the liorns measure thii-teen feet from tip to 

 tip," realised £61 19s. 



