CHAP. XIX.] FOSSIL REMAINS. 259 



BUS were among this assemblage of fossil genera : but this was a 

 mistake ; nor have either of these genera been as yet met with, 

 fossil or recent, in any part of America, although the swine intro 

 duced by man, have multiplied so fast. The horse {Equus curv- 

 idens) was a species having teeth in the upper jaw more curved 

 than any living horse, ass, zebra, or quagga ; and it is singular 

 that, although there was no wild representative of the horse tribe 

 on the American continent, north or south, when discovered by 

 the Europeans, yet two other fossil horses were found by Mr. 

 Nuttall on the banks of the Neuse, fifteen miles below Newbern, 

 in North Carolina.^ The shells and bones of a large extinct 

 species of tortoise were also found to accompany the above-men 

 tioned fossil quadrupeds of Georgia ; and I myself picked up 

 many fragments of this Chelonian strewed over the banks of 

 earth cast up from the Brunswick Canal. 



In another part of the excavations made in digging the canal, 

 the ribs and vertebrae of a whale much rolled, and with barnacles 

 attached to them, were discovered belonging to the subjacent 

 marine formation. In this sand the shells, as before stated, are 

 of recent species, and Mr. Hamilton Couper has collected no less 

 than forty-five distinct species exclusive of Echinoderms. 



In what manner, then, has the destruction of these quadrupeds, 

 once so widely spread over the American continent, been brought 

 about ? That they were exterminated by the arrows of the In 

 dian hunter, is the first idea presented to the mind of almost 

 every naturalist. But the investigations of Lund and Clausen 

 in the limestone caves of Brazil have established the fact, that 

 with the large mammalia there were associated a great many 

 smaller quadrupeds, some of them as diminutive as field mice, 

 which have all died out together, while the land shells, once their 

 contemporaries, still continue to exist in the same countries. We 

 must look, therefore, to causes more general and powerful than 

 the intervention of man, to account for the disappearance of the 

 ancient fauna, an event the more remarkable, as many of the 



* Mr. Conrad intrusted me with Mr. Nuttall s collection, and Mr. Owen 

 has found among them the three species of Equidse here alluded to, Equus 

 curvidens, E. plicidens^ and a third species of the size of E. asinus. 



