ELEPHANT. 637 



or antero-posterior diameter, following the curve on the convex 

 side is one foot seven inches : the number of the lamelliform 

 divisions of the crown is twenty-eight : this remarkably fine molar 

 exhibits the most complete state in w^hich the actions of masti- 

 cation permit so large a grinder to be seen : the anterior portion 

 of the crown having been worn down to the common base of 

 dentine, from which the fang is continued, and the digital divi- 

 sions, which form, by their basal confluence, the last or hindmost 

 plates, are calcified. These terminal portions of the last molar, 

 always in the Proboscidians the most subject to variation, manifest 

 the same anomalous position which has been noticed in the cor- 

 responding tooth of the Asiatic Elephant, and are folded upwards 

 and laterally upon the concave part of the tooth ; the sides of 

 the digitated plates being parallel with the grinding surface of the 

 tooth. 



The above generalisations have been derived from a com- 

 parison of some hundreds of the molar teeth of the Elephas 

 primigeniuSf which have been disinterred from the superficial 

 deposits of this Island, and are published with further details and 

 observations on the varieties of race, age, and sex, in my * His- 

 tory of British Fossil Mammalia.' They prove that the deve- 

 lopment, progressive complication, and succession of the molar 

 teeth, obeyed the same laws in the ancient Mammoth, as in the 

 existing Elephant ; it may, indeed, be affirmed that these most 

 remarkable phenomena 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 existing in our metropolitan museums. 

 John Hunter owed most of his illustrations of the succession 

 and shedding of the teeth in the Elephant, 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. 



Cuvier first pointed out that the molars of the fossil Elephant 

 were broader than those of the existing species, and that the 



