ON THE FOSSIL BONES OF THE ELEPHANT. 285 



in the same place, and on one of these occasions the skull of a species 

 of ox was found. 



North America. — The Russian Captain Kotzebue discovered, as 

 everybody knows, on the coast of America, to the north of Behring's 

 Straits, and beyond the polar circle, a spacious entry, which might well 

 be supposed to lead towards the east ■ — either to the sea, observed by 

 Mackenzie in 1789, or to the passage to which Captain Parry pene- 

 trated in 1819. 



Even these frightful regions yield the fossil bones of elephants. 

 They are found in a tongue of sand, and very close to the ice. 



M. Adalbert de Chamisso, the learned naturalist who accompanied 

 M. Kotzebue, has brought from thence a tusk four feet long and five 

 inches in diameter, which he has deposited in the Museum of Berlin. 

 He has been so kind as to send me a coloured drawing of it. It is 

 slightly arched and very pointed. The layers of ivory are very 

 contrary to their grain, and in parts entirely effaced. Their surface is 

 creviced and uneven, and the general colour of this fossil is very 

 brown. 



This tusk bears a strong resemblance to one found in the canal of 

 the Ourcq ; so that we have every reason to believe that it belonged to 

 the ordinary mammoth of the Russians. 



M . de Chamisso states that some molars and a smaller fragment of 

 a tusk were found in the same place, that fossil ivory was common 

 there, and that the sailors burned several pieces in their fires. The 

 natives of the country make use of it for divers purposes, as well as the 

 teeth of the rosemarus and the cetacean*. 



In the Journal of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, for June, 1823, 

 Mr. Richard Harlan speaks of fourteen specimens of this species found 

 in Kentucky, Carolina, and on the Ohio. He gives drawings of some 

 teeth, in which we may observe the same accidents from detrition as 

 in those of Europe f. 



Article II. 



A Comparison of the Fossil Remains of Elephants, with the corre- 

 sponding parts of Living Animals. 



1 . Comparison of the Jaws. 



From their ignorance of the details of the formation and the manner 

 of increasing of teeth in general, the describers of fossils have fallen 

 into innumerable blunders ; but as the circumstances connected with 

 the molars of the elephant are still more complicated and more dif- 



* See the German Narrative of the Voyage of M. Otton de Kotzebue, Weimar, 

 1821, vol. iii, p. 171. 



f Mr. Pentland announces, in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal of 1832, that a 

 discovery was made in a cave in New Holland, in 1831, of the bones of elephants 

 mixed with those of dasyuers and other didelphes. Those caverns are hollowed in 

 calcareous rock, and bear a strong resemblance to those of Europe, by their geological 

 position. (Laurillard). 



