FOSSIL MAMMALIA. 79 



fallen into a similar error in a description, addressed to Pallas, of 

 a tooth in the British Museum. He could not have confounded 

 this tooth with that of the great mastodon, because he has proved 

 himself elsewhere to have been well acquainted with this latter 

 animal. . But as he was ignorant of the distinction between the 

 mastodon with narrow teeth, and that of the Ohio, he might 

 have been deceived respecting a single tooth. The teeth of 

 that mastodon, as we have observed in the proper place, at a 

 certain stage of detrition, exhibit some resemblance on a. larger 

 scale to those of the hippopotamus, being marked with trefoils 

 in a similar way. But at all events, the tooth in question could 

 not, by any possibility, have belonged to the living hippopota- 

 mus, nor to that one usually found in the fossil state, since it is 

 four times as large as theirs. 



Many more errors of this description have been committed. 

 M. Merck describes a molar found in the environs of Francfort- 

 on-the-Maine, as belonging to the hippopotamus, but which 

 turned out to be an intermediate tooth of the mastodon of the 

 Ohio, the summits of which were a little worn. M.deLuc 

 speaks of an hippopotamus's tooth, found among volcanic pro- 

 ductions in the same neighbourhood, but this M. Merck assures 

 us belonged to the rhinoceros. Charles Nicholas Laing, in a 

 work published in 1708, Historia lapidum figuratorum Hel- 

 vetia, has made a still greater mistake, in attributing to the 

 hippopotamus the teeth of the horse. It is singular enough, by 

 the way, that lithologists should have been repeatedly deceived 

 concerning the teeth of this latter animal, notwithstanding that 

 the species is so very common. 



Davila, a very modern writer, in the catalogue of his cabinet, 

 describes the jaw of an hippopotamus, with five molar teeth, 

 found in the plaster-quarries in the neighbourhood of Paris ; 

 but the Baron, whose authority respecting this locale is indis- 

 putable, assures us that no remains of the hippopotamus were 

 ever found there. He is persuaded that this same jaw was a 

 fragment of the great palceothenum. 



