1847.] OWEN ON EXTINCT ANTHRACOTHERIOID QUADRUPEDS. 119 
in the vaguer sense which they bore in times antecedent to the great 
Reformer of the Nomenclature of Natural History. Thus, for ex- 
ample, he extends the term Felis to Machairodus ; that of Hlephas 
to Mastodon ; and, under the name of Anthracotherium, ranks not 
only the aberrant species from Puy en Velay, of which Cuvier points 
out the difference in the structure of the molars, but likewise the - 
Hyracotherium (see his ‘Ostéographie,’ Anthracotherium, pl. 3) and 
Dichodon, of which three true molars are figured in the same plate 
under the name of Anthracotherium minutum. Consistently with 
this use of the generic term Anthracotherium, M. de Blainville con- 
tends for its extension to the Cheropotamus of Cuvier. In fact, the dif- 
ference of structure of the molar teeth presented by the typical Anthra- 
cotherium magnum and the so-called Anthracotherium velaunum, is 
hardly greater than that between the typical Anthracotherium and the 
Cheropotamus ; but the dentition of the lower jaw of Cheropotamus, 
as described and illustrated in the Transactions of the Geological 
Society (2nd Series, vol. vi. p. 41. pl. 4), opposed a difficulty to 
the suppression of Cuvier’s genus, which could only be surmounted 
by repudiating the determination of the lower jaw there attempted to 
be demonstrated. I may be permitted therefore, having recently 
visited Paris for the purpose of comparing the original specimens on 
which Cuvier founded the genus Cheropotamus, to offer a few re- 
marks in confirmation of the conclusions arrived at in the Memoir, 
which the Geological Society has done me the honour to publish in 
their ‘Transactions’ (2nd series, vol. vi.). 
The restoration of the lost species of animals is usually a work of 
time and the result of successive approximations; it may be retarded 
by attempts to destroy the value of previously-acquired evidence, and 
confidence in results laboriously and conscientiously arrived at, and 
intrinsically true, may for a time be shaken by the hardy contradic- 
tions of authors in the position of the distinguished Professor of 
Comparative Anatomy in the Garden of Plants. What, for example, 
can be the aim, or what the gai to zoology, of such statements 
as that a fossil mandible,—which, according to the figures copied 
by M. de Blainville into his own work, has its angle produced 
backward, and its symphysis unexpanded; in which the canines are 
small, and the first premolars large,—has nevertheless belonged to an 
animal ‘‘probablement dune espece de Sus’’? The characters of 
the genus Sus have been acknowledged and confirmed by the zoolo- 
gical experience of a century. All the features of resembiance, and 
they are of minor importance, which the lower jaw and teeth of the 
Cheropotamus present to the Porcine family, are limited to the Lin- 
neean genus Dicotyles, which forms, as it were, a barrier preventing 
closer approximation of the extinct Cheropotamus to the genus Sus. 
M. de Blainville, after giving an extract of my description of the 
lower jaw of the Cheropotamus, observes, in reference to that genus, 
“que M. R. Owen lui a attribuée avec quelque probabilité, mais sans 
une certitude absolue, comme nous le verrons plus loin.” Farther 
on, after affirming that my attribution of the lower jaw in question 
to the Cheropotamus was made “sans discussion, probablement 
VOL. IV.—PART I, K 
