XL MAMMALIA OF STONESFIELD. 237 



of small depth, but relatively considerable breadth, whence the 

 name of stiff or solid jaw. The most perfect of the teeth has six, 

 nearly equal, curved cusps in two longitudinal rows, on a squarish 

 crown ; an arrangement not unlike what occurred in a tooth found 

 in the Keiiper of Diegerloch in Wurtemberg f , and also not unlike the 

 crowns of some pachydermata. The teeth have double fangs. 



Professor Owen has fully described this curious specimen, and con- 

 cludes it to have belonged to some quadruped much allied in dentition 

 to pliolophus, and therefore to have been hoofed, with herbivorous 

 habits of life a very 'wee bit' of an artiodactylous mammal. 



Until additional specimens occur, this jaw must remain without 

 settled alliances. Some of the teeth classed as microlestes, found 

 in rhaetic beds, are multicuspid, and the cusps are in rows; there 

 may have been other analogies. 



The singular fact of only separate branches of lower jaws being 

 found, and these to the extent of a dozen or more, belonging to 

 four species, can only be explained by supposing the lower jaws 

 to have been easily separable from the body, and to have become 

 divided at the symphysis, through the feeble coherence there; and 

 then the separated parts to have found rest from some watery 

 transport at points removed from those where the main part of the 

 body was deposited. This is a probable view. Every flood gives 

 us occasion to see in English waters floating bodies of small decaying 

 animals, whose open mouths are releasing the lower jaws, un- 

 covered by integuments, while the rest of the skin-protected 

 skeleton is carried far away. 



Thus a picture of the ancient surface rises before us, in which 

 the Stonesfield lagoon, full of fishes and mollusks, receives with 

 every cyclonic storm drifted branches of cypresses and swarms of 

 wind-wrecked insects, while the swollen land-streams bring down, 

 but not with equal rate of motion, the bony remains of amphibious 

 and terrestrial lizards, which perished on the banks and river beds, 

 and the bodies of small mammals which had sported in the trees. 

 Not far off were coral reefs, and great beds of shells, and fishes, 

 and over all 



' . . . adsunt 

 Harpyiae, et magnis quatiunt clangoribus alas.' 



MN. iii. 225, 6. 



f A drawing of this tooth (named Microlestes by Dr. Oscar Franz) was lent me 

 by the late lamented Dr. Falconer. The tooth is said to be lost. 



