INTRODUCTION. 109 
among ossiferous debris, or are found under ques- 
tionable circumstances; as if the progress of man 
with his flocks had been attended by wild and 
domestic canines, and their presence in the west 
was coeval.* 
With regard to foxes, their remains may be of a 
somewhat older date; but still they occur in the 
tertiary series, though it is stated to be the older in 
the Eocene of Lyell. Others were found in the 
gypsum of the basin of Paris, and in the quarries of 
Oeningen and Constance; but burrowing animals 
might be found below very ancient rocks, without 
therefore positively fixing the period of their exist- 
ence. It must, however, be admitted, that frag- 
ments of jaws of foxes were found mixed in the 
same red earth which contains bones of hyzenas, 
horses, ruminants, elephants, &c. in the Oreston 
and other caves near Plymouth.t 
* The species noticed by Baron Cuvier seem to have been 
mere debris, from which, however, he was enabled to indicate 
four,—the two first from the Franconian caverns, the last 
from the calcariferous selenite of the vicinity of Paris; they 
were therefore of a coeval period with Paleotherium, and be- 
long to an anterior zoology ; but their characters and distinc- 
tions are not explicitly given. The two first mentioned, 
however, belong to the latest period; one representing the 
characters of a wolf, may be the same as that of the Torquay 
deposit, the skull perhaps deserving the name of lurcher wolf ; 
and the other approaching the jackal, but larger than our 
present foxes. 
+ The foregoing chapter was written before we became 
aware of the review of Mammalia in the Edinburgh Journal 
of Natural History, where many considerations relating to 
