560 Geological Society: Anniversary Address, 1843. 
Brandt, of which I have been just informed by my friend Count 
Keyserling. Pallas had spoken of a locality among the cliffs of Ta- 
man, in the southern steppes, where remains of whales were found ; 
Rathke had mentioned the head of an animal of which the vertebrae 
were known, and which he described as approaching to a whale; 
and more recently Professor Eichwald considered this fossil as be- 
longing to the Dolphins and named it Xiphias priscus. Obtaining 
possession of the specimen for the museum of St. Petersburgh, Pro- 
fessor Brandt worked the head of the colossal creature out of the 
rock in which it was imbedded, and pronouncing it to belong toa 
new family of whales, described it under the name of Cetotherium 
Rathkit. This fossil whale forms a new link in the animal king- 
dom, and is more nearly allied to the herbivorous cetaceans than 
to the Dolphins. Its position in the geological series is also most 
remarkable ; for the rock in which it occurs containsshells similar to 
those of the tertiary deposits of the Miocene age, which extend from 
Volhynia and Podolia to the Crimea and Taman. It is also very 
remarkable, that along with this herbivorous cetacean the other 
organic remains (among which, however, banks of corals occur) 
have more the character of the inhabitants of a brackish sea than 
those of the subjacent rocks, whose fauna more resembles that of the 
Black Sea and the Mediterranean. 
These relations are in accordance with modern conditions, and 
are, indeed, explained by an analogy in our own country, for an ac- 
quaintance with which I am indebted to our Curator, Mr. E. 
Forbes. The lake of Stennis, in the Orkney Islands, cele- 
brated by Sir Walter Scott, has been converted, whether by 
elevation of the land or other cause, from a saltwater loch 
into a freshwater and marshy tract, and with this great but 
gradual change, certain marine genera have continued to live 
on amid their new associates of land and fresh water, whilst others 
have perished. That which is taught on a small scale in the Scottish 
lake has occurred over a vast area in the case of the Caspian Sea ; 
which, in consequence of separation from the Black Sea has passed 
into a brackish state, and the same hardy and time-serving marine 
genera as in Scotland have continued to exist in their new abode ! 
The Miocene deposit of Taman, therefore, with its herbivorous ce- 
taceans, brackish and marine shells, is only an example, in an earlier 
period of the world, of the formation of a true Caspian, the creatures 
in which necessarily differed from those of the pure marine period 
which went before them. 
MASTODONTOID AND MEGATHERIOID ANIMALS. 
For a season our metropolis contained within it a magnificent 
skeleton of a Mastodontoid quadruped, which, in common with all 
geologists and paleontologists, I hoped to see permanently esta- 
blished in our national Museum. This gigantic animal was discovered 
by a persevering Prussian collector, M. Koch, who for some time 
resided in the United States, and who disinterred it, together with a 
great profusion of heads, teeth, and numerous bones of similar animals, 
