FALCONER MASTODON AND ELEPHANT. 255 



Monte Mario, Monte Verbo, and other localities in the south of Italy. 

 The measure of time involved in the thus-implied duration of the 

 species is best appreciated by considering some of the changes that 

 appear to have taken place in Europe during the interval. The Alps, 

 the Pyrenees, and the Apennines have all undergone a considerable 

 amount of elevation. When the earliest Elephants were roaming over 

 the emerged land of Italy, a wide and open sea-communication would 

 seem to have existed between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic 

 Ocean, admitting of a common province for the MoUusca of the 

 shores of the Crag-sea and of Italy, and a common resort for the 

 Whales and Dolphins which abounded at that period in European 

 waters. Portions of the Pliocene sea-bottom of the Subapennines, 

 consisting of stratifiedbeds full of marine shells, and containing nearly 

 entire skeletons of Elephants and lihinoceros, have been thrown up 

 into hills, which, after a long series of ages of degradation, still 

 maintain an elevation of 1700 feet above the level of the adjoining 

 sea. Yet, if we are to accept the confidently expressed opinion of 

 Cuvier, long after his early inferences had been questioned, the same 

 form of Mammoth lived through all these mighty changes, and it is 

 only yesterday as it were, in relation to the Human epoch, that its 

 last remnant was exterminated and frozen up in the perennial ice 

 cliffs of the Arctic Circle. 



It will hardly be denied by any one who attempts to reconcile the 

 English and Continental classifications, that the arrangement of the 

 newer Tertiary and Glacial deposits in successive chronological 

 order is at present in a very unsatisfactory state, probably more so 

 than that of any part of the older Tertiary series : and it appears to 

 me that nothing has contributed more to retard the progress of this 

 section of geology in Britain than the generally accepted belief 

 in the specific unity of the Mammoth, wherever fossil remains 

 of Elephants were discovered in European strata. The percentage of 

 extinct Mollusca, so valuable a guide in the identification of the 

 middle Tertiaries, becomes in the newer Tertiaries an evanescent 

 quantity — at every step more elusive as we ascend upAvards ; and if 

 the geologist tried to extract some help from the associated Mam- 

 malian remains, he Avas at once perplexed by the ubiquitous presence 

 of the Mammoth. The very name oi Elephas primigenms was sug- 

 gestive of "transported gravel," " diluvial action," " glacial drift," or 

 some other explanation suggested by the image of the Woolly Mam- 

 moth, frozen in, fiesh and bone, at the mouth of the Lena ; so that 

 every stratum in which Elephant-bones were met with was regarded 

 in some degree under the influence of a foregone conclusion. Nu- 

 merous instances might be cited of the force of this bias upon the 

 views of some of the ablest writers on the geology of the later 

 Tertiary deposits. 



The object of the present communication is to show that several 

 European fossil species, belonging to two distinct subgenera, have 

 been generally confounded under the name of Elephas prbnigeiihis, 

 that these species are susceptible of being discriminated, not on mere 

 trivial or uncertain, but upon broad and well-founded distinctions, 



VOL. XXI. PAllT I. T 



