DINOSAURS 161 



London, and ransacked all the drawers in the Hunterian Museum 

 that contained jaws and teeth of reptiles, but without finding 

 any that threw light on this subject. Fortunately, Mr. Samuel 

 Stutchbury, then a young man, was present, and proposed to 

 show him the skeleton of an Iguana, which he had himself pre- 

 pared from a specimen that had long been immersed in spirits. 

 And now the puzzle was in a fair way to being solved; for, to 

 his great delight, the doctor found that the minute teeth of that 

 reptile bore a closer resemblance in their general form to those 

 from Tilgate Forest than any others he had ever seen. 



In spite of this fortunate discovery, however, others remained 

 obstinate and unconvinced ; and it was not until he had collected 

 a series of specimens, exhibiting various stages of the teeth, that 

 the correctness of his opinion was admitted, either as to their 

 true interpretation, or the age of the strata in which they were 

 imbedded. And now there came good news from Paris. Cuvier, 

 with the fresh material submitted to him, had boldly renounced 

 his previous opinion, and gave the weight of his great authority 

 to the view maintained by the discoverer of these teeth. In a 

 letter to the doctor he said that such teeth were quite unknown 

 to him, and that they belonged to some reptile. He suggested 

 that they implied the existence of a new animal, a herbivorous 

 reptile. Time would either confirm or disprove the idea, and in 

 the mean time he advised Dr. Mantell to seek diligently for 

 further evidence, and, if part of a jaw could be found with 

 teeth adhering, he believed he could solve the problem. In his 

 immortal work, Ossemens Fossiles, Cuvier generously admits his 

 former mistake, and said he was entirely convinced of his error. 



Baron Cuvier alone amongst the doctor's friends or corre- 

 spondents was able to give any hint as to the character and 

 probable relations of the animal to which the recently discovered 



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