1 28 CANID.E. 



Oreston in company with Mr. Warburton, M.P., the pre- 

 sent President of the Geological Society, states 



u The bones appeared to us to have been washed down 

 from above, at the same time with the mud and fragments 

 of limestone through which they are dispersed, and to have 

 been lodged wherever there was a ledge or cavity suffici- 

 ently capacious to receive them ; they were entirely with- 

 out order, and not in entire skeletons ; occasionally frac- 

 tured, but not rolled ; apparently drifted but to a short 

 distance from the spot in which the animals died ; they 

 seem to agree in all their circumstances with the osseous 

 breccia of Gibraltar, excepting the accident of their being 

 less firmly cemented by stalagmitic infiltrations through 

 their earthy matrix, and, consequently, being more de- 

 cayed ; they do not appear, like those at Kirkdale, to bear 

 marks of having been gnawed or fractured by the teeth of 

 hysenas, nor is there any reason to believe them to have 

 been introduced by the agency of these animals. 1 ' 1 * 



In respect to all the fossils referable to the genus Canis, 

 which were submitted to Mr. Cliffs inspection, the closest 

 and most careful comparisons demonstrated a perfect agree- 

 ment of the jaw-bones, in size, in form, and in the arrange- 

 ment of the teeth, with those of a full-grown recent Wolf. 

 " The os humeri," Mr. Clift says, " is perfectly similar, 

 and has the rounded aperture through its lower extremity 

 to receive the curved process of the olecranon."-f- This 

 character is shown at a, in the fossil figured in cut 47. 

 Nevertheless, the experience of comparative anatomists 

 teaches that the teeth and bones of the existing Wolf, 

 referred to in the foregoing comparisons, are not distin- 

 guishable from those of the larger varieties of the Dog, and 



* "Reliquiae Diluvianse," p. 73. t Philos. Trans. 1823, p. 97. 



