ELEPHANT AND MASTODON. 17 



sophical Transactions for 1768, gave some good figures of the 

 back grinders, and shrewdly observed that the form of their crown 

 was adapted for crushing boughs, twigs, and leaves, betokening the 

 animal to have been of herbivorous habits. 1 William Hunter, 

 struck with the great contrast between the salient enamel ridges of 

 these teeth and the narrow plated flat surface in the grinders of the 

 Elephant, inferred the American fossil to have been a gigantic 

 carnivorous animal, which he proposed naming Pseudelephant. 2 

 The great reputation so justly attaching to the name of Hunter gave 

 undue weight and a wide currency to this very erroneous opinion, 

 and further led to the Mammoth of Siberia being commonly con- 

 founded under the same carnivorous notion with the Mastodon of 

 North America. 



Peter Camper, in the first instance, made a considerable step 

 towards an accurate knowledge of the extinct animal, by the 

 inference that its molar teeth had a greater analogy with those 

 of the Elephant than of the Hippopotamus ; and that, like the 

 former, it was probably invested with a trunk and with tusks : 3 but 

 he afterwards expressed doubts which compromised the value 

 of his original observations, having been led to adopt the opinion 

 of Michaelis, that the animal belonged to the order Bruta of 

 Linnaeus ; that it had no tusks, and differed greatly from the 

 Elephant. 4 This error, as has been explained by Cuvier, arose 

 from the inspection of a detached palate with grinders, the 

 posterior part of which was mistaken, both by Michaelis and by 

 Camper, for the anterior. 3 



Pennant first ventured, in 1793, to designate the American 

 fossil animal in a systematic work as a species of Elephant, by 

 the name of E. Americanus ; and Blumenbach, in 1797, erected 

 it into a kind of genus, under the name of Mammut Ohioticum, 

 which he briefly characterized by the form of the teeth. Cuvier in 

 his earliest memoir on the Elephant, described it also as a 



1 Collinson, Phil. Trans. 1768, vol. lvii. p. 469. 



2 W. Hunter, Phil. Trans. voL lviii. p. 38. 



3 Camper, Acta Petropolit. torn. i. part 11, p. 219. 



1 Idem, loc. cit. tom. ii. p. 259. s Oss. Foss. torn. i. p. 212. 



