190 Correspondence — Mr. E. Ray Lankester, 



ELEPEAS MERIDIONALIS IN THE NORWICH CRAG. 



Sir, — I must beg you to allow me space for a few additional re- 

 marks — Firstly, Mr. Gunn's " evidence" is, I may venture to say, 

 without offence, undeniably no evidence at all, and the way in which 

 Mr. Fisher uses it in building a theory is an example of a common 

 method of the growth of error. Mr. Fisher is quite right in saying 

 that Mr. Whincopp's collection does not contain E. meridionalis, nor 

 do other equally fine collections known to me. Mr. Fisher aban- 

 doning E. meridionalis as a Eed Crag fossil, observes — " The species, 

 however, is abundant in the Norwich Crag, which is sufficient for 

 my argument." I would ask here, what exactly is the mode of occur- 

 rence of E. meridionalis in the Norwich Crag ? How many molars 

 have been found, and in what parts of the Norwich Crag ? The head- 

 quarters of E. meridionalis in this country are undoubtedly in the 

 Forest-beds, and the few specimens which appear to have come from 

 the Norwich Crag, may have been derived, or have come froru a 

 representative horizon of the Forest-bed. Why does Mr. Fisher 

 speak of " Miocenes of the south" as furnishing derivata to the 

 Suffolk bone-bed ? Surely Miocenes of the north will satisfy the 

 required conditions better. 



Some of Mr. Fisher's paragraphs lead me to suppose that I have 

 been understood as wishing to dispute the identity of the Eed and 

 Norwich Crags. This was not my intention. I quite believe that 

 they shade off into one another — the more northern beds of the 

 Upper Crags being newer than the southern ; this rule holding good 

 for the various localities of the Eed Crag, as well as the Norfolk 

 Crag. My object was merely to get the facts rightly stated. The 

 truth is, that nothing is known of the terrestial mammalia of the 

 Coralline, or Eed Crag period, i.e., of a fauna ccBval with the marine 

 fauna of those deposits, and I believe the same is true for the Nor- 

 wich Crag. The contents of Mr. Gunn's stone bed have no more to 

 do with the Norwich Crag than have the contents of the Suffolk 

 Bone-bed (two species of Mastodon, Rhinoceros, etc., Cetacean bones 

 and nodules of Plio-miocene ^ age,) to do with the Eed Crag. I 

 should much like to see a list of Mammalian remains in addition to 

 the Mastodon teeth, found in Mr. Gunn's stone-bed. The Mastodon 

 does not occur in this country with Elejphas meridionalis at all — nor 

 in France — and we may doubt if it does so even in the Val d'Arno, 

 since the strata may have belonged to different horizons which fur- 

 nished the one to the other. The relations of — 1st, the Mastodon- 

 fauna, of the Suffolk bone-bed and Norfolk stone-bed ; 2nd, the E. 

 Meridionalis -faunsi of the Forest-bed ; and 3rd, the Marine-fauna of 

 the Crags, have still to be worked out, and this can only be done by 

 keeping the three quite distinct and adhering to fact. I think I 

 have clearly shown that the Mastodon, Cetacea, etc., of the Suffolk 

 bone-bed are older even than a deposit (the sandstone nodules) con- 

 taining Conus, Cassidarice, Pyrula, and Isocardia, in place of the 

 more boreal forms of the Crags. The question arises as to whether 



1 This compound is used to avoid offence. 



