ELEPHAS PRIMIGENIUS. 223; 
indeed, be affirmed that these most remarkable pheno- 
mena in the comparative anatomy and physiology of 
teeth are more fully and perfectly illustrated by the 
fossils which the primigenial Elephants have left in the 
superficial deposits of England, than by any collection of 
the molars of the Indian or African Elephants now ex- 
isting in our metropolitan museums. John Hunter owed 
most of his knowledge, and his specimens illustrative of 
the succession and shedding of the teeth in the genus 
Elephas, to the fossil molars of the Mammoth, which, with 
similar remains, he had been silently collecting at a time 
when they attracted little if any attention, and some years 
before the recent Elephant’s teeth brought from India by 
Mr. Corse, afforded the materials for Mr. Corse’s and Sir 
Everard Home’s papers on this subject in the eighty-ninth 
volume of the Philosophical Transactions. 
In a fossil lower jaw of a Mammoth, younger than 
the subject of figure 86, which was obtained by the late 
John Gibson, Esq., of Stratford, from the pleistocene brick- 
earth at Ilford, the remains of the socket of the molar corres- 
ponding to the first small one in the Indian Elephant, and 
the crown of which is divided into four transverse plates, 
are still visible ; it 1s about one inch in length.* 
This tooth is succeeded by a second molar consisting of 
eight transverse plates, the length, or antero-posterior extent 
of the tooth being three inches, its breadth, one inch and a 
half. Dr. Buckland has figured the corresponding second 
molar of the upper Jaw of a young Mammoth in pl. 7, fig. 
1, of the ‘ Reliquie Diluviane:’ the specimen was dis- 
covered in the Hyzna-cave at Kirkdale. The subjoined 
cut (fig. 87) gives a view of a second molar tooth of the 
* In the Asiatic Elephant, the corresponding molar cuts the gum eight or ten 
days after birth, and is shed at the age of two years, 
