314 FAUNA ANTIQUA SIVALENSIS. 



wide currency of his great work have contributed largely to 

 propagate an injurious error. 



With the countenance of two such names as Professor 

 Owen and Sir Charles Lyell to the inaccurate statement, it 

 is not to be wondered at that it should have become incor- 

 porated in succum et sanguinem with the reputed history of 

 the science, as a fact, by systematic writers. Among others, 

 I may cite Pictet, who, in his ' Palseontologie,' faithfully 

 follows the author of the ' British Fossil Mammalia ' in 

 assigning to Captain Cautley and myself 'I'annee suivante,' 

 i.e. 1837. 



The facts of the case are so plain, that I do not think it 

 necessary to urge them beyond a parallel illustration : — Sup- 

 pose a registry to be established in London for the record of 

 all births of British parentage within the Imperial dominions, 

 home and colonial; let two births, of distinct parentage, 

 take place, say in Calcutta, in the month of November, 1861 ; 

 let one of them be gazetted on the spot in a local periodical, 

 and let the other appear in the ' Times ' as soon as possible, 

 with authentic particulars, in the month of January, 1862. 

 What should be said of the accuracy of the registrar who 

 inserted in his record that the one birth had taken place a 

 year after the other ? 



Eighteen years have passed since the statement first ap- 

 peared, in 1844, in the 'British Fossil Mammalia,' dui'ing 

 which period I have remained silent ; and it may be thought 

 that the right of redress has lapsed, through default, by the 

 effluxion of time. I admit that every correction of the kind 

 should be vindicated at once, in the interest of truth, irre- 

 spectively of other considerations ; yet personal indifference 

 to so palpable an inaccuracy, and constitutional aversion from 

 the hispid walks of controversy, led me to disregard it. The 

 matter would probably never have been noticed by me, had 

 not immunity from correction led to further error in Pro- 

 fessor Owen's work, entitled ' Palseontology,' the second 

 edition of which appeared in 1861, and in which the following 

 paragraph occurs in the part devoted to the fossil Quadru- 

 mana : ' Genus Semnopithecus. — To this genus belong the 

 petrified jaws, teeth, and astragalus, from the older pliocene 

 or miocene rocks of the Sub-Himalayan hills, near Sutlej, 

 India, discovered in 1836 by Durand and Baker.' Thus, 

 what we were the first to discover is not merely abstracted 

 from us, but we are struck out of the record. It was full 

 time, therefore, that I should step forward to vindicate the 

 cause of truth. 



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