158 



BRITISH AND EUROPEAN FOSSIL ELEPHANTS. 



well-marked variety of the former. In either view the case 

 is one of high interest in its palseontological and systematic 

 relations. This form is provisionally designated E. Arme- 

 niacus in the Synoptical Table p. 14 of the first part of this 

 essay. The molar teeth combine the closely approximated 

 and attenuated ridges of the Mammoth with the highly un- 

 dulated enamel-folding or ' crimping ' which is so character- 

 istic of the Indian Elephant. 1 



3. Elephas (Euelephas) primigenius. — In a strictly me- 

 thodical order, E. antiquus would follow next among the 

 European fossil species for description. But it will better 

 suit the objects of this essay first to dispose of E. primigenius, 

 the Mammoth properly so called, since most of the disputed 

 points involved in the question of distinct species or varieties 

 only of a single form turn upon the exact determination of 

 the characters of the Mammoth. 



Whatever may have been the approximation previously 

 made by Merk or Blumenbach towards a distinction of the 

 Mammoth from the two living species, Cuvier was undoubtedly 

 the first to characterize the extinct species with exactness, in 

 his joint memoir with Geoffrey, under the name of Elephas 

 Mammoth, in the year 1796. 2 In the same year he read a 

 memoir at the first public meeting of the ' Institute,' but 

 which was not published until 1806, in which the diagnostic 

 marks are very pointedly expressed under the designation of 

 Elephas Mammonteus : ' Maxilla obtusiore, lamellis molarium 

 tenuibus, rectis,' as distinguished from Elephas Indicus : 

 ' Fronte plano-concava, lamellis molarium arcuatis, undatis.' 

 Cuvier connected these dental and mandibular distinctions 

 with others yielded by Messer Schmidt's figure of the skull 

 of the Mammoth, and combined the whole in the extended 

 specific definition of the extinct form, which appeared in his 

 memoir of 1806 — ' L'Elephant a crane allonge, a front concave, 

 a tres-longues alveoles des defenses, a machoire inferieure ob- 

 tuse, a machelieres plus larges, paralleles, marquees des rubans 

 plus serres.' He abandoned the name E. Mammonteus of his 

 memoir of 1796, and adopted the designation of Elephas pri- 

 migenius, proposed by Bluemenbach, 3 in 1803, which is that 

 now generally accepted among palaeontologists. To this 

 normal form, as already stated, Cuvier referred all the fossil 

 remains of Elephants found over the whole of Europe, in 

 Northern Asia, and in North America, however much at 

 variance with the terms of his definition ; and to the last he 

 clung to the specific unity of the ' Elephant fossile ' with the 



1 See Memoir in Elephas Columbi. — 

 [Ed.] 



2 Mem. de l'lnstitut, l re Classe, torn. ii. 



3 Voigt's Mag. 1803, Band v. p. 16. 



