134 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AND PALAEONTOLOGY. 



All known fossil reptile forms were included by Cuvier in 

 I his Researches, and were fully discussed by him in respect of 

 their own characteristic features, and their affinities to living 

 genera. 



Among fossil Mammalia the teeth and bones of elephants 

 first attracted attention and gave occasion to various hypo- 

 theses. Fossil ivory and large bones were known to the 

 Greeks and Romans; Suetonius reported on fossil "giant 

 bones " in the Museum of Emperor Augustus at Capri, which 

 probably were remains of fossil elephants. Kircher and many 

 other authors in the Middle Ages mentioned the occurrence of 

 elephant remains in different parts of Italy. A whole skeleton 

 was unearthed at Crussol in the Rhone Valley in 1456, and a 

 second in the Dauphine in 1613. The latter won great 

 notoriety. A surgeon, Mazurier, said it was the skeleton of 

 Teutobochus, King of the Cimbers, and made money by the 

 display of individual bones in Paris and other cities. It then 

 became the subject of a heated controversy between Habicot 

 and Riolan \ Habicot holding the bones to be those of a man, 

 Riolan asserting the bones were those of an elephant. As 

 time went on, frequent discoveries of large bones were made 

 in France, Belgium, and Germany. 



The skeleton found at Burgtonna in 1696 was one of the 

 most famous discoveries, as it gave rise to a dispute between 

 Ernst Tentzel and the medical faculty in Gotha. The 

 other professors saw in the large 'bones only sports of nature, 

 but Tentzel proved to their discomfiture that the bones were 

 real, and had belonged to elephants. In 1700 a bed of fossil 

 bones was observed near Cannstatt, containing astonishing 

 numbers of elephants' teeth, some of which have been pre- 

 served in the Stuttgart Museum. Pallas had made known the 

 occurrences of mammoth bones in Russia and Siberia; and in 

 ^1796, Cuvier summarised all the previous literature on this 

 ftubject in a brilliant treatise on fossil elephants. Blumen- 

 bach was the first author who distinguished the fossil elephant 

 or " Mammoth" under the term Elephas primigenius. from the 

 two existing species. 



Another fossil mammal which received considerable atten- 

 tion was the woolly-haired Rhinoceros antiquitatis or tichori- 

 num. Pallas had in 1772 described a completely preserved 

 carcass with hide and flesh in the frozen ground of Siberia. 

 Skulls and other remains of this species were also found in 



