MACEOTHERIUM. 379 



Of the latter family or order, however, represented at the 

 present day by the Dugongs and Manatees, there were 

 abundant and more widely distributed representatives during 

 the miocene period, having, upon the whole, the nearest 

 affinity with the existing African Manatee (Manatus Senega- 

 lensis), but with associated characters of the Dugong (Halicore). 

 There were, e.g., two incisive tusks in the upper jaw, and four 

 or five small incisors along the deflected part of each ramus of 

 the lower jaw. The upper molars, with three roots, were 

 thickly enamelled, like those of the Manatee, but with a pat- 

 tern of grinding surface which led Cuvier to attribute detached 

 specimens to a small species of Hippopotamus. The lower 

 molars had two roots. All the bones have the dense or solid 

 structure of those of the Sirenia. On the remains of this 

 remarkable amphibious Mammal, discovered in the miocene 

 beds at Eppelsheim, Kaup founded the genus Halitherium. 

 Other remains have been discovered in Piedmont, Aste, and 

 many parts of France, from the "calcaire grossier" of the 

 Gironde, containing Lophiodont fossils, up to the pliocene 

 near Montpellier ; at which period the Halitherium seems to 

 have become extinct. 



Genus Macrotherium, Lartet. — The edentate order, which 

 is so abundantly and variously represented in South America, 

 which has its Orycteropes and Pangolins in Africa, and its 

 Manises in tropical Asia, has no living representative in 

 Europe. Perhaps the most unexpected form of Mammal to 

 be revealed by fossil remains from European tertiary deposits, 

 after a Marsupial, was a member of the edentate order. 

 Cuvier, by whom the evidence of this extinct animal was first 

 made known, prefaces his description of the single mutilated 

 phalangeal bone, on which that evidence was founded, by the 

 remark, that "nothing proves better the importance of the 

 laws of comparative osteology than all the consequences which 

 one may legitimately draw from a single fragment." 



