206 JIAMMALR. 



Plosiosaurus by Dr. Harlan, and wliich in the museum stood labelled " Mullica Ilill," would, no 

 doubt, as observed by LyoU, be a cretaceous fossil if reallj' derived from that locality, but he remarks 

 that its mineral condition makes the point rather doubtfvd. The occurrence of the other ver- 

 tebra belonging to the same genus, not in a cretaceous but in a miocene deposit, adds to the doubt ; 

 for it seems exceedingly unlikely that two vertebras belonging to the same species or genus of a 

 new animal, should be found at about the same time, the one in secondary, and the other in 

 tertiary strata ; the two deposits being, the one far down in the secondary, and the other far up 

 in the tertiary series. It is much less credible that the same form of life should have jjersistcd 

 in a mammal through these two epochs, than that a transposition or error should have been made 

 in one of Harlan's labels, especially when it is considered that the importance attached to the 

 discovery was not anticipated at the time it was made. No other mammal has ever survived 

 from one epoch into another. The Mammoth (almost the onlj' other alleged example of such an 

 event) being, as I trust I have proved, only " dicyclotherian" in name ; its so-called " dicyclotherian " 

 life, moreover, being a mere span of time compared to that implied in the space between the deposit 

 of the greensand and any miocene bed. 



It is chiefly in the deposits of the miocene epoch (of course the marine) that Cetacean remains 

 are met with. Remains of at least two species of whalebone Whales are known, viz. one belonging 

 to the section Bal^na, or right Whale, from the Paris Tertiaries, and the other, a species, or perhaps 

 two, of Bal.^noptera, " the finner," from Pulgnasco, near Placentia, in Italy. Remains of a Dolphin- 

 Whale, Bat,^^nodon gibbosus, occur in vast numbers in the red crag of Suffolk ; they chiefly consist 

 of teeth and " cetolites," or ear-bones, and have been washed out of pre\aous strata into the red 

 crag. " These fossils," says Professor Owen, " belong to species distinct from any known existing 

 Cetacea, and which probablj', like some contemporary quadrupeds, retained fully developed char- 

 acters, which are embryonic and transitory in existing cognate mammals. The teeth of these 

 Cetacea were determined in 1840, the ear-bones in 1843. The vast numbers of these fossils, and 

 the proportion of phosphate of lime in them, led Prof. Henslow to call the attention of agri- 

 cultural chemists to the red crag as a deposit of valuable manure. Since that period it has yielded 

 a large supply, worth many thousand pounds annually, of the superphosphates. The red crag is 

 found in patches from Walton-on-Naze, Essex, to Aldbro', Suffolk, extending from the shore to 

 fi.ve or fifteen miles and more inland. It averages in thickness ten feet, but is in some places 

 forty feet. Broken up septarian nodules form a rude flooring to the crag, left by the washing ofl" 

 of the London clay, and are called ' rough stone.' The phosphatic fossils or ' cops,' as they are 

 now locally termed, occur in greatest abundance immediately above the ' rough stone.' Thousands 

 of cubic acres of earlier strata must have been broken up to furnish the Cetacean nodules of the 

 ' red crag.' This is a striking instance of the profitable results of a seemingly most unpromising 

 discovery in pui'e science." * 



A large number of fossil remains of Cetaceans has recently been found in the excavations 

 occasioned by the fortifications of the city of Antwerp. Five or six other distinct species have 

 been described in miocene and pliocene formations in Western Europe ; for instance. Professor 

 Owen has named and figured the ear-bones of what he considered four difft'rent species, from the 

 red crag above mentioned, but they are imperfect, and the amount of variation on the ear-bones, 

 nay, for that matter, on any of the bones of the Cetacea, is not yet sufficiently known, and must be 



* Owen's "Paleontology," p. 343, ISGO. 



