254 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



every Mammal found in the fossil state should be determined spe- 

 cifically with precision, and I endeavoured to illustrate the point by 

 the entanglement and confusion of the Faunas of the Miocene and 

 Pliocene periods, which had arisen from so many distinct forms of 

 different ages having been ranged by Cuvier and later palaeontolo- 

 gists under the common name of 31astodon angustidens. 



The observation applies with still greater force to the case of 

 Elephas primigenius, to which a scope in space and time, taken to- 

 gether, has been assigned, without a parallel, I believe, within the 

 whole range of the Mammalia, fossil or recent. D'Archiac, in his 

 excellent ' Histoire des Progres,' so late as 1848, gives a brief 

 summary of the localities in which the remains of the " Mammoth 

 (E. primigenius) have been said to occur, namely, from the British 

 Isles across the whole of the temperate zone of Europe and of Asia, 

 and along all the coasts and islands of the Icy Sea, as far as the 

 frozen cliff's of the east coast of Behring's Strait ; in Escholtz Bay ; 

 in Russian America as high as 66° of N. lat. ; over most of the 

 United States of North America ; in the great valley of the Missis- 

 sippi; and along the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico"*. Struck with 

 the extent of this vast area, including aU the emerged lands between 

 the parallels of 40° and 75° N. lat., he puts a query whether the 

 Elephantine remains met with by Humboldt on the plateau of Quito 

 and at Cumanacoa in Columbia, did not also belong to the same 

 species f. De Blainville, going a step beyond most other palaeonto- 

 logists, doubtingly referred the fossil remains of Elephants found so 

 abundantly in tropical India to the same species J, thus assigning 

 at least half of the habitable globe for the pasture-ground of the 

 Mammoth. 



The duration allotted to the same species is equally remarkable. 

 Discovered fresh, either in the frozen cliffs or in ice-blocks at 

 the mouth of the Lena, it has been traced, through its osseous re- 

 mains, in the superficial gravel-beds over nearly the whole of nor- 

 thern and the greater part of central Europe. Here it has consis- 

 tently been found in company with the Siberian Rhinoceros (i?. 

 antiquitatis, Blum.), the Musk-ox, and the Reindeer. The same 

 specific form has been carried down into the so-called " Pleistocene " 

 clay, loam, and mud deposits which are so massively developed on 

 the Norfolk and Suffolk coast, in company with R. leptorhinus, 

 Hippopotamtbs major, and other extinct forms ; thence through the 

 submerged forest and lignite-bed of Happisburgh and Mundesley into 

 the Crag in company -wiih Mastodon (Tetralophodon) Arvernensis ; and 

 abroad into the ** Older Pliocene " beds of the Subapennines, and of 



* Bronn enumerates the following localities : — Spain, Apulia, and Sicily ; the 

 Islet of Gozo near Malta, Athens, and Odessa ; the whole of Europe except 

 Scandinavia; from the Caucasus, through the whole of Siberia, north to the 

 Polar Sea, and Kamtschatka; on the north-west coast of America as far as 

 Escholtz Bay; on the east side of North America, in Ohio, Kentucky, and 

 South Carolina, including the parallels between 40° and 76® N. lat. (Lethrea 

 Geognostica, Band iii. p. 819.) 



t Op. cit. torn. ii. p. 378. 



X ' Osteographie': " Des Elephants," p. 222. 



