﻿MONOGRAPH 



ON THE 



BEITISH FOSSIL ELEPHANTS. 



ELEPHAS ANTIQUUS. 



I.— INTRODUCTORY. 



The history of the discovery of the remains of the Elephant described in this Memoir has 

 been narrated by Dr. Falconer in his masterly essay on ' The Species of Mastodon and 

 Elephant occurring in the Fossil State in Great Britain.' 1 It seems important here, how- 

 ever, to indicate certain points in connection with the discovery. Up to the year 1844 

 all remains of Elephants met with in the Tertiary formations of the British Islands were 

 considered to belong to the Elephas primigenius* At that time Dr. Falconer was engaged 

 in arranging and describing the rich harvest of Tertiary Vertebrata collected by himself, 

 Sir Proby Cautley, Mr. Fraser, and others, in the Tertiary beds of the Sub-Himalaya 

 and river deposits of Central India. During the preparation of the 'Fauna Antiqua 

 Sivalensis,' which began to be issued during the following year, he was struck with the 

 resemblance between molars from India and certain teeth of Elephants found in the 

 Norwich Crag and deposits of the Thames Valley ; moreover, it seemed to him that the 

 molars from the Thames Valley agreed with similar teeth discovered by Nesti in 

 Tuscany as far back as 1808. It is asserted, however, by Dr. Falconer that at that 

 time he was not sufficiently conversant with the foreign specimens ; inasmuch as, instead 

 of connecting the Norwich Crag molars with those from the deposits of Tuscany, he made a 

 mistake and correlated the molars from the Thames Valley and the latter under the name 

 Elephas meridionalis of Nesti, whilst to the owner of the teeth from the older British 

 strata he gave the name of Elephas antiquus. This mistake, unfortunately, was per- 

 petuated in the representations of the two species published in the 'Fauna Antiqua 



1 ' Journal Geological Society of London,' vols, xiii, xiv, and xxi, reprinted in the ' Palseontological 

 Memoirs of the late Dr. Falconer,' vol. ii. 



2 Owen, ' British Fossil Mammals,' p. 232. 



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