8 FOSSIL MAMMALIA. 



terrestrial animals must have lived in the place where their 

 remains are found. 



The circumstance of finding, amidst the ice of the north, the 

 carcasses of elephants and rhinoceroses with flesh and hair, 

 proves that the retreat of the waters at the era of their de- 

 struction must have been prompt. A sudden change must 

 have also taken place in the temperature of these countries ; 

 for these carcasses were found in places to which they could 

 not have been transported at the present day, and were besides 

 so frozen up, that in the instance of the elephant found by a 

 Tungoose in 1799 (as will be subsequently seen), several years 

 elapsed before all the parts of the body could be extricated. 



Had the waters retired slowly, the entire surface of the earth 

 so abandoned would have been like the shore of the sea ; an- 

 cient cliffs would have been found wherever elevations existed, 

 and the fossil shells would have been defaced like those now 

 found on the sea-coast. But nothing of all this occurs. Many 

 fossil shells are found broken, but not worn : their angular 

 points are not blunted. This is declared by M. Defrance to 

 be invariably the case with those of France, Italy, England, 

 and North America, which he has examined, with the excep- 

 tion of such as are found in the falun of Touraine, which in 

 all respects resembles the shelly sand of the sea-shore. The 

 shells found there are almost all broken ; their angles are 

 blunted, and in the apertures of the univalves stones or other 

 shells are repeatedly found which are difficult to be got out, 

 just exactly as we find it to be with those on the sea-coasts. 

 Terrestrial helices are even found there of a species unknown 

 in the country filled with the debris of marine polypi and shells. 

 It is natural to imagine that the soil of Touraine where the 

 falun is found was exposed to the dashing of the waves which 

 covered those parts of France where the bed of coarse, shelly 

 limestone is found, and with which the falun of Touraine has 

 the strongest affinity. 



