hy the Study of Domestic An'mink. 197 



All simple as the ideas propounded in this essay may be, it 

 appeared necessary to discuss and develope them ere I pro- 

 ceeded to the corollaries which I mean to deduce from them. 

 The intimate links which connect these ideas, and consequently 

 the corollaries also, to a theory which had been long disputed, 

 and very generally misunderstood, made this preliminary labour 

 the more necessary. Moreover, it is only reasonable, and almost 

 indispensable, that when one is about to employ a new or but 

 little known instrument, he should first carefully consider 

 all the advantage he can derive from if, and so to speak, esti- 

 mate Its power. Such was my air^i in making these remarks, 

 prehminary to a memoir I shall speedily submit to the Aca- 

 demy upon a long contested question, The Specific Unity of 

 Max. 



On the Sivathermm, a new fossM Ruminant Genus found in 

 Tertiary Strata in the Valley of the Markanda, in theSivalik 

 branch of the Sub-Himalayan Mountains. 



The fossil remains of this new genus were discovered in the 

 district above mentioned, associated with bones of the fossil ele- 

 phant, mastodon, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, &c., by two meri- 

 torious officers, Dr Hugh Falconer and Captain P. T. Cautley, 

 who have published an interesting account of their investiga- 

 tions in the First Part of the Nineteenth Volume of the AsijUic 

 Researches, printed at Calcutta in 1836. From the details of 

 these officers, it cannot be doubted that the Sivatherium belongs 

 to a genus now, for the first time, made known to naturalists. 

 Some difference of opinion has arisen as to the place which this 

 newly discovered animal should occupy in the zoological system. 

 Messrs Falconer and Cautley remark, 



" That the Sivatherium was a very remarkable animal, and fills up an im- 

 portant blank in the interval between the Ruminantiaand the Pachydermata. 

 I hat It was a ruminant, its teeth and horns clearly establish ; and the struc- 

 ure which we have inferr^ed of the upper lip, its being a proboscis, the osteo- 

 logy ot the face, and the size and position of the orbit, approximate it to the 

 i-achydermata. The circumstance of any thing approaching a proboscis is so 

 abnormal for a ruminant, that, at first view, it might raise a doubt regarding 



