ELEPHAS PRIMKJENIUS. 223 



indeed, be affirmed that these most remarkable pheno- 

 mena 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 ex- 

 isting in our metropolitan museums. John Hunter owed 

 most of his knowledge, and his specimens illustrative of 

 the succession and shedding of the teeth in the genus 

 Elepkas, 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, and some years 

 before the recent Elephant's teeth brought from India by 

 Mr. Corse, afforded the materials for Mr. Corse's and Sir 

 Everard Home's papers on this subject in the eighty-ninth 

 volume of the Philosophical Transactions. 



In a fossil lower jaw of a Mammoth, younger than 

 the subject of figure 86, which was obtained by the late 

 John Gibson, Esq., of Stratford, from the pleistocene brick- 

 earth at Ilford, the remains of the socket of the molar corres- 

 ponding to the first small one in the Indian Elephant, and 

 the crown of which is divided into four transverse plates, 

 are still visible ; it is about one inch in length.* 



This tooth is succeeded by a second molar consisting of 

 eight transverse plates, the length, or antero-posterior extent 

 of the tooth being three inches, its breadth, one inch and a 

 half. Dr. Buckland has figured the corresponding second 

 molar of the upper jaw of a young Mammoth in pi. 7, fig. 

 1, of the ' Reliquiae Diluvianse : ' the specimen was dis- 

 covered in the Hyaena-cave at Kirkdale. The subjoined 

 cut (fig. 87) gives a view of a second molar tooth of the 



* In the Asiatic Elephant, the corresponding molar cuts the gum eight or ten 

 days after birth, and is shed at the age of two years. 



