INTRODUCTION. XIX 



mentary deposits are in their turn raised from the bed of 

 the recipient ocean, and made dry land. 



Scanty as are the eocene Mammalia hitherto disco- 

 vered in the London clay, they are highly interesting 

 from their identity or close affinity with some of the pe- 

 culiar extinct genera of the Paris basin. In the fresh- 

 water and marine beds, at the north side of the Isle of 

 Wight, and at the opposite coast of Hampshire, there 

 occur the remains of the same species of quadrupeds as 

 have been found in the contemporaneous Parisian forma- 

 tions. One of the rarest and most remarkable of the Pa- 

 chyderms, whose peculiar characters were obscurely indi- 

 cated by Cuvier from scanty fossils yielded by the Mont- 

 martre gypsum, has had its claims to generic distinction 

 established, and its nature and affinities fully illustrated, by 

 more perfect specimens from the eocene limestone of the 

 Isle of Wight : in no other part of Great Britain has any por- 

 tion of this animal, the Chreropotamus, been found, except 

 in the above limited locality, which alone corresponds with 

 the formations of the Paris basin in mineral character, as 

 well as in date of origin. This discovery becomes, therefore, 

 peculiarly interesting arid suggestiye. For, were the com- 

 mon notion true, that all the fossil remains of quadrupeds 

 not now existing in our island had been brought hither 

 during a single catastrophe, and had been strewed with the 

 detritus of a general deluge over its surface, what would 

 have been the chance of finding the solitary bone of a Cho> 

 ropotamus in the very spot, and in the very limited locality, 

 where alone in all England the same kind of fresh-water 

 deposits existed as those in which the unique upper jaw 

 of the same extinct species had been found in France ? 

 With the Choeropotamus are associated in the Binstead and 



Seafield quarries of the Isle of Wight remains of Anoplo- 



b 2 



