10 GEOLOGICAL MEMOIRS. 



burg Museum, which had been brought together from the most 

 distant parts of the Russian empire. He undertook the management 

 of this Museum in 1758, and his attention was immediately directed 

 to four Rhinoceros skulls, the most perfect of which he described in 

 1761 *. Pallas soon afterwards visited Siberia, and there found that 

 remarkable relic, the carcase of a Rhinoceros, on the banks of the 

 Willuji, an affluent of the Lena. This was in December 1771, and 

 two years afterwards f he gave a description and figure of some of its 

 parts, together with that of a perfect skull discovered at the Baikal 

 Sea. To the latter he also devoted a second memoir in the * Acta ' 

 for 1777, and, in the ' Neuen Nordischen Beitragen ' of 1779, he 

 noticed other Rhinoceros bones discovered in Kasan. During this 

 time, in Germany also, some notice had been taken of the fossil Rhi- 

 noceros. Ziickert illustrated with some fine drawings | the bones 

 that had been exhumed from the Seveckenberg in 1 728 by former 

 members of my family and preserved in the collection of Privy Coun- 

 sellor Miiller at Berhn. Soon afterwards, 1782-84-86, Merk's im- 

 portant letters appeared ; the first of which contains a description of 

 a skull and several parts of a skeleton from the banks of the Rhine, 

 in the Darmstadt district. In the second letter was mentioned the 

 discovery of another skull near Worms, on which CoUini also wrote 

 a memoir §,— another skull from near Cumbach, — two teeth from 

 Weissenau, and a third from Strasburg. The last letter refers also 

 to the bones dug up near Cologne and at other places in Germany. 

 Although not conversant with osteology, yet, from a careful com- 

 parison of the fossil remains with which he was acquainted, Merk 

 recognized two specifically distinct Rhinoceroses as having once ex- 

 isted in Germany, both of which also were decidedly distinct from 

 the two living species which were then known to naturalists. Still 

 earlier, Camper H had pointed out the difference between the species 

 with, and the species without incisor-teeth, and had entered into a 

 discussion with Pallas on the presence of incisors in a Siberian skull ; 

 the examination subsequently (in England) of a Sumatran skull with 

 incisors convinced him of this specific difference. 



These were the materials on which Cuvier worked, and on which 

 his faculty of classification was brought to bear. In 1795 and 1797 

 he gave his views on the peculiar species with lengthened skull and 

 two horns. In the beginning of this century he read an elaborate 

 memoir on both the fossil and the living species of Rhinoceros, of 

 which he distinguished four or five. But notwithstanding Cuvier' s 

 satisfactory exposition of the difference of the species, Faujas St. Fond, 

 in his *Essai de Geologic,' 1801, asserted that the greater length of 

 the skull and the ossification of the nasal septum in the Siberian 

 Rhinoceros were conditions characteristic merely of age, and that the 

 animal differed not from the species now living in Central *Africa. 

 No refutation of this view appeared, and it was forgotten. In the 



* Act. Petersb. Acad. vol. ii. f Act. Petersb. Acad. vol. xvii. 



X Beschaft. Naturforsch. Freunde in Berlin, vol. ii. 1776. 

 § Abhandl. Mannheim. Akad. vol. v. 

 II Act. Petersb. Acad. 1780. 



