341 



shire, Warwickshire. Salisbury, the Isle of Shepey, and indeed in several 

 other parts of Great Britain, have different remains of these animals been 

 found. 



When we add to those places which have been already enumerated, 

 Scandinavia, Ostrobothnia, Norway, Iceland, Russia, Siberia, Tunis, 

 America, Hue huetoca, near Mexico; and Ibarra, in the province of 

 Quito, near Peru; it will appear that there is hardly a part of the known 

 world, whose subterranean productions are known to us, in which these 

 animal remains have not been found. Ann. du Mus. Tome vm. p. 1. 



Notwithstanding the frequency with which the fossil remains of ele- 

 phants have been found, there are hardly any fossils of a known genus of 

 animals, respecting which so many mistakes have been committed. At 

 no very remote period, not only the bones, but even the teeth, have been 

 considered as the remains of a gigantic race of men ; and Aldrovandus, 

 Kundmann, and others, have mistaken the fossil teeth of elephants for those 

 of other animals. Leibnitz, who wrote in 1749, gives, in the twelfth 

 plate of his Protogcea, the engraving of an elephant's grinder, which he 

 describes as Dens animalis marini ; and even M. de la Metherie, in his ex- 

 cellent work, published so lately as the year 1797, describes a tooth found 

 in Dauphigny, as belonging to an elephant of Africa, which Cuvier has 

 since shown to be a tooth of the great tapir : and the same author con- 

 siders the teeth from the Ohio, and those brought from Peru by Dom- 

 bey, to be those of the African elephant* ; whilst, as M. Cuvier observes, 

 the fossil teeth of Dauphignj% of Peru, and of the Ohio, not only have no 

 resemblance with each other, but are all totally different from those of 

 the African elephant. So far, indeed, have mistakes respecting the re- 

 mains of the elephant proceeded; that Kircher, Mercatus, and Aldrovan- 

 dus, have described the fragment of elephants' teeth as petrified hands 

 (chirites). Kundmann went so far as -to insist, not only that one of these 

 fragments was the petrified paw of a large baboon, but that the skin, 



* Theorie de iaTerre, Tome V. p. 200 and 201. 



