264 ON THE FOSSIL BONES OF PACHYDERMATOUS QUADRUPEDS. 



Sloane was in possession of a tusk exhumed in Gray's-Inn Lane, 

 London, from some gravel, twelve feet beneath the surface *. 



The splendid mineralogical map of England, published in 1819 by 

 the Geological Society of London, and principally due to the industry 

 and zeal of Mr. Greenough, president of that learned society, points 

 out a depot of elephants' bones on the coast of Kent, to the north of 

 Canterbury, in a spot usually covered by the high tides. 



The isle of Sheppy, lying not far from thence, at the mouth of the 

 Thames and Medway, has yielded a tusk, a vertebra, and a thigh, in 

 a spot which is also washed by the sea f. 



Mr. Vetch, an English officer, has shown me the drawing of a jaw 

 bone seventeen English inches long, and of twenty-one plates, which 

 he found in 1820, at Chatham, near the Medway, at a depth of four 

 feet in the gravel : he deposited it in the British Museum. 



There were some elephants' bones, with those of the rhinoceros, the 

 hippopotamus, the stag, and the ox, which were discovered by the late 

 Mr. Trimmer, close to Brentford, in Middlesex, opposite Kew, with 

 land and fresh water shells ; there is a description of them in the 

 Transactions of the Philosophical Society, of 1813. They were in a 

 gravel bed, resting on an extensive layer of that blue clay which 

 stretches over such an extent of country both in France and England I. 

 Two large portions of jaws belonging to this collection are peculiarly 

 remarkable. M. Deluc mentions similar discoveries having been 

 made in the same place as early as 1791 §. 



Near Woodstock, in Oxfordshire, in a quarry called Stonefield, they 

 found some vertebree, and a very large thigh ||. 



Sloane was also in possession of a molar tooth from Northampton- 

 shire, found in blue clay, beneath fourteen inches of vegetable earth, 

 eighteen of clay, and thirty of shells mixed with earth %. Cuper ** 

 would have it, that this was the very identical elephant of Caesar, which 

 we have just mentioned ; but they are found in such numbers, that 

 this objection is no longer maintainable. 



A molar of fourteen plates, found in the same county, lay at a greater 

 distance : it was beneath sixteen feet of vegetable earth, five of sandy 

 clay, mixed with shells, a foot of black sand, mixed with small stones, 

 a foot of fine gravel, and two of coarse gravel. The blue clay only 

 commenced at this point ff. 



At Newnham, near Rugby, in Warwickshire, they found, in 1815, 

 three large tusks, with other bones of elephants, and, at the same time, 

 two skulls of the rhinoceros, to which I shall hereafter advert, and a 

 quantity of stags' horns. These fossils were in a gravel very much 

 mixed with clay. I am indebted for these facts to a Mr. Howship, a 



* Academy of Sciences, 1727, p. 306, &c. 



T Jacob, Philosophical Transactions, vol. xlviii, p. 626, 627. 



J Phil. Trans, of 1813. 



§ Letters to Biumenbach, p. 15. 



|| Medical Journal of Venice, quoted by Targioni, Travels, vol. viii. 



Tf Sloane, passage above quoted, p. 434 ; and Morton's Natural History of 

 Northamptonshire, p. 252. 



** Gisb. Cuper, de Eleph. in numm. obv., p, 154. 



ft Sloane, at the passage above quoted, p. 445 ; and Morton, ibid, and table xi., 

 fig. 4. 



