e. (loxodon) meridionalis. 



105 



that Cuvier liad laid so much stress upon the peculiar form 

 of the lower jaw, and guttered beak of the symphysis, as dis- 

 tinctive marks of E. primigenius, Nesti (not a professed ana- 

 tomist) was naturally led to direct his attention, in the first 

 instance, chiefly to the same parts in the Val d'Arno remains. 

 Unluckily the specimen that presented the most pronounced 

 beak had lost its molar teeth ; ISTesti assumed it to be of an 

 Elephant. But this selected ' piece justificative ' for his Ele- 

 phas meridionalis was proved by Cuvier to be the lower jaw 

 of Mastodon Arvemensis, 1 and E. minutus to be merely a young 1 

 Elephant. 



After a long interval, during which Cuvier had visited the 

 Tuscan collections, ISTesti brought out another memoir upon 

 the subject, in which, upon greatly extended observations on 

 specimens of all ages, from the foetus upwards, including 

 crania, lower jaws, molars, tusks, and bones of the extremities, 

 he upheld the soundness of his first inference in regard to 

 the distinctness of E. meridionalis, while he admits tacitly 

 the force of Cuvier's criticism upon his second species, E. 

 minutus. The memoir is accompanied by figures of the cra- 

 nium, lower jaws, and molars, but so imperfectly executed, 

 that they proved of little service either in establishing his 

 case or in guiding other paleontologists to a satisfactory con- 

 clusion. Another circumstance, which materially damaged 

 the authority of ISTesti upon a question of such difficulty and 

 importance, is that he states that, after examining a vast num- 

 ber of molars of all ages, he had found them to vary so much — 

 some having thick plates, others thin, and the same tooth 

 presenting such different patterns, according to its age and 

 degree of wear — that he had abandoned the characters 

 yielded by the molar teeth as worthless (!) for any reliable 

 marks of specific distinction. In the teeth themselves he 

 had discovered no sensible differences from the characters 

 figured and described of those of E. primigenius. This sin- 

 gular conclusion is, in some measure, explained by the fact 

 that hardly a specimen of a molar of the true Mammoth ex- 

 ists in the Florentine Museum for comparison. It is, per- 

 haps, still more remarkable that the experienced eye of Cuvier 

 should have glanced over the multifarious evidence supplied 

 by the Tuscan collections, without being convinced that E. 

 meridionalis was a well-founded species, considering the rapi- 

 dity with which he seized, and the logical precision with 



1 Note from Dr. F.'s Note- Book.—' Flo- 

 rence, May 20, 1859. Again examined 

 this lower jaw. It is of an animal not 

 quite adult, and probably contained the 

 antepenult imato and penultimate teeth. 



It is clearly a Mastodon. Another lower 

 jaw near it has the spout even a little 

 longer, but not like M. tongirostris or M. 

 angnstidcns' — [Ed.] 



