INTRODUCTION. XIX 
mentary deposits are in their turn raised from the bed of 
the recipient ocean, and made dry land. 
Scanty as are the eocene Mammalia hitherto disco- 
vered in the London clay, they are highly interesting 
from their identity or close affinity with some of the pe- 
culiar extinct genera of the Paris basin. In the fresh- 
water and marine beds, at the north side of the Isle of 
Wight, and at the opposite coast of Hampshire, there 
occur the remains of the same species of quadrupeds as 
have been found in the contemporaneous Parisian forma- 
tions. One of the rarest and most remarkable of the Pa- 
chyderms, whose peculiar characters were obscurely indi- 
cated by Cuvier from scanty fossils yielded by the Mont- 
martre gypsum, has had its claims to generic distinction 
established, and its nature and affinities fully illustrated, by 
more perfect specimens from the eocene limestone of the 
Isle of Wight: in no other part of Great Britain has any por- 
tion of this animal, the Cheropotamus, been found, except 
in the above limited locality, which alone corresponds with 
the formations of the Paris basin in mineral character, as 
well as in date of origin. This discovery becomes, therefore, 
peculiarly interesting aud suggestive. For, were the com- 
mon notion true, that all the fossil remains of quadrupeds 
not now existing in our island had been brought hither 
during a single catastrophe, and had been strewed with the 
detritus of a general deluge over its surface, what would 
have been the chance of finding the solitary bone of a Che- 
ropotamus in the very spot, and in the very limited locality, 
where alone in all England the same kind of fresh-water 
deposits existed as those in which the unique upper jaw 
of the same extinct species had been found in France ? 
With the Cheropotamus are associated in the Binstead and 
Seafield quarries of the Isle of Wight remains of Anoplo- 
b2 
