243 <>.\ mi; po.ssil r.u.N) ta of PA.enimi£HM-ATOv& QiiADRtrPEna, 



Beauvais, an entire tusk, and in 1815, a small jaw. JM. Traulle, 

 a correspondent of the Institute, who is indefatigable in his re- 

 searches, had the kindness to make me acquainted with both of these 

 discoveries. These pieces were under blocks of fragments of silex, 

 which, in this district, cover a bed of sand mixed with particles of 

 chalk. Since that period, some others have been discovered in the 

 same place, upon which M. Rigollot, professor of medicine, read a 

 paper to the Academy of Amiens, in 1819. 



M. Traulle is also in possession of a numerous collection of the 

 bones of the elephant and rhinoceros found together at Abbeville in 

 the Faubourg of Menche Court; he has sent us some rather large 

 portions of the tibia of a very young elephant. 



M. Baillon has sent us from the same place an upper epiphyse 

 of the tibia. 



On the 20th of September, 1809, M. Duroche, engineer of roads 

 and bridges, sent to the King's Museum some portions of jaw bones 

 which formed part of a heap found twenty feet deep at Viry, on the 

 borders of the valley ofl'Oise, and, as at Amiens, in a flinty gravel, 

 and on a bed of sand. 



The fossil elephants of Belgium have long been known to the 

 learned world. The erudite physician, Van Gorp, alias Goropius 

 Becanus *, as early as the sixteenth century, combated the prejudice of 

 attributing to giants, bones and teeth of this description, found in the 

 neighbourhood of Antwerp. At the same time, he mentions the bones 

 of two elephants exhumed near Vilvorde, in a canal which the inha- 

 bitants of Brussels were opening between that city and Rupelmonde, 

 to avoid some vexatious interference on the part of the inhabitants of 

 Malines. Like others of his time, he attributes them to the expeditions 

 of the Romans, and especially to those of the emperors Gallienus 

 and Posthumius. 



Jean Laurentzen, in his edition of the Museum of the King of Den- 

 mark, by Jacobseus, part 1, sect. 1, No. 73, relates the story of a skele- 

 ton which Otho Sperling saw exhumed at Bruges, in 1643, a thigh of 

 which was preserved in that Museum. It was an elephant's thigh, 

 four feet long, and weighing twenty-four pounds. M. de Burtin, in 

 the first and second chapter of his Dissertation on the " Revolutions 

 of the Surface of the Globe," which gained the prize at Haar- 

 lem in 1787, says that he is in possession of an elejmant's tooth, 

 discovered in Brabant. He adds (p. 180), that a very large fossil head 

 of that species was drawn from a river, two leagues from Louvain, by 

 some fishermen. 



M. Delimbourg also alludes to those bones in a memoir inserted 

 among those of the Academy of Brusselsf. 



Besides those of Lorraine already mentioned, there are others farther 

 down on the Meuse. M.Valenciennes has procured, for the King's 

 Museum, some fragments of tusks found in the upper beds of the 

 mountain of St. Pierre, near Maestricht, so celebrated for the bones of 

 reptiles, which it contains at a greater depth in its interior. 



* Origin of Antwerp, book ii, page ]0 7, and the Oigantomachia. 

 f Vol. i, p. 4 10. 



