168. Memoir upon living and fossil Elephants. 
The tusk was encrusted in the heart of a solid volcanic 
breach, which not only forms the summit of the hill of. 
Arbres, but stretches in horizontal strata under all the Coi- 
rons, of which it forms the base. M. Cordier knows se- 
veral other places where the fossil bones are enveloped in 
volcanic matters. 
On approaching the Pyrenees, great collections of bones 
are met with, The Black Mountain in particular contains 
a great quantity, 
If we turn towards the north, they are not less abundant, 
There is inthe Museum a piece of a shoulder-blade, discover- 
ed near Chalons-sur-Saone. The labourers employed on. 
the grand centre canal have recently discovered a depot of 
bones in the same province. By means of M. Gerardin, in 
the employment of the Museum, I have received a very 
large jaw from this depdt. There was a rhinoceros jaw 
found near it. 
The environs of Paris abound with fossil ossifications, 
In digging the canal which brings the waters of the Ourcq 
to Paris, two tusks and two jaws were dug up, larger than 
any Ieversaw. M. Girard, the directory of this canal, sent 
them to me for the purpose of being deposited in the mu- 
seum, 
As I carefully examined the ground where they were 
found, along with M. Girard, and M. Alexander Bro- 
gniard the mincralogist, I think a short description of it 
here will be extremely acceptable. 
The canal is dug in the plain of Pantin and Bondy, the 
soil of which is 70 or 80 feet above the level of the Seine, and 
which embraces the foot of the gypsous hills of Montmar- 
tre and Belleville. ‘This plain is formed to the depth of 40 
feet of different layers of sand, marle, and clay; but no cal- 
careons stone has been met with, although there is plenty of 
it at the level of the river at St. Quen, The cana] in some 
places passes through beds of gypsum. In some places the 
beds of marle and clay are hollowed, as if they formed ba- 
sons or pits filled with foreign matters. There are, in fact, 
at these places heaps of blackish earth, which fill these cre 
Z vices, 
