286 ON THE FOSSIL BONKS OF PACHYDERMATOUS QUADRUPEDS. 



ficult than those relating to the teeth of other animals, they have given 

 rise to a greater variety of mistakes. 



In the first place, many authors^have been in possession of entire and 

 well formed molars of elephants, without being aware of the circum- 

 stance. 



This has been the case of Aldrovandus, Leibnitz, Kundmann, Beuth. 



The contra^, also, has notunfrequently occurred, and teeth of quite 

 a different species have been passed off as the teeth of elephants. 



Aldrovandus, in his Treatise on Metals, gives as the teeth of 

 elephants, three of those of the hippopotamus. 



M. de le Metheria in his Theory of the Earth, vol. v, p. 200, says, 

 that the tooth found near Vienna in Dauphine, and engraved in the 

 Journal de Physique, of February, 1773, p. 135, appears to have be- 

 longed to the African elephant. I shall show that it must have be- 

 longed to a species of large tapir. 



The same author assures us, at p. 201, " That it is now a well 

 authenticated fact that the teeth of Ohio, and those brought from 

 Peru, by Dombey, are those of an elephant of the same species as 

 that of Africa." And yet the teeth of Vienne, of the Ohio, and of 

 Peru, do not resemble each other, and neither one nor the other re- 

 semble those of the African elephant. 



Other writers have fancied they could establish specific differences 

 on the number of teeth existing at the same time in the jaw. Thus, 

 Merk, in his second Letter on the Fossil Bones of the Rhinoceros, 

 printed at Dermstadt in 1784, attempts to establish a difference 

 between the living and the fossil elephants, from the circumstance of 

 the jaws which came under his observation being furnished with but 

 two teeth, while those of the elephant described by Daubenton were 

 furnished with four. He fills eight pages with his arguments on this 

 subject, and yet he concludes by offering the same explanation for this 

 variation that Pallas had offered before him, namely, by referring it to 

 the difference of their ages. M. Morozzo, in the Memoirs of the 

 Italian Society, vol. x, p. 162, also tells us that the elephant has but one 

 tooth on each side. 



Some writers, in their ignorance of the diminution which takes place 

 in the size of these teeth before they fall, as well as of the great dif- 

 ference between the teeth of the young and the old animals, have 

 been led to fancy that the small molars which are found isolated be- 

 longed to some elephant of a smaller species. 



Others, again, heedless of the circumstance that the upright plates, 

 which form the greater part of the body of the tooth, proceed from 

 a common base, and that in the teeth worn down to this base, the 

 plates must be more or less irregularly united to each other, have 

 classified teeth very much worn down, as belonging to a peculiar 

 species. Of this sort are the teeth found in the depot at Thiede, of 

 which M. de Strombeck has given engravings in his translation of 

 Breislack, vol. ii, p. 428. The plates are there so large, and are so ir- 

 regularly united in the centre, that they give to the crown of the tooth 

 an appearance which Ave have some difficulty in referring to those of the 

 common fossil teeth ; nevertheless, to obtain a similar appearance, it is 



