ON THE BONES OF THE HIPPOPOTAMUS. 393 



of figured stones, at a place called Mosson, in the territory of Mont- 

 pellier. 



" These discoveries, at which M. Chirac was present, embarrassed 

 us so much the more, as, being unable to find any resemblance between 

 them and the skull of the horse and the ox, with which we compared 

 them, we were at a loss to know to what animal to attribute them ; 

 and it was not until we had obtained a sight of the remains of the 

 latter, that we became convinced that these petrified bones had belonged 

 to the hippopotamus." 



Although Antuine de Jussieu has not given either a drawing or a 

 particular description of these fossils, the manner and the place in 

 which he describes them, after having just described a real head, and 

 having, as it would appear, the fresh bon:'S and the fossils beneath his 

 eyes, leave no room for doub'ing of the litter having really resembled 

 those of the animal to which he attributes them ; nay, I have sufficient 

 reason for believing that the specimens observed by Chirac, and by 

 Antoine de Jussieu, arc precisely the same pointed out by Daabentun 

 in numbers mcii and mciv, which I shall describe farther on. It 

 is provable that Chirac, who was then Superintendent of the King's 

 Museum, had transferred them from Montpellier to Paris, and placed 

 them in the Museum, where Daubenton may afterwards have found 

 them, without any further reference. 



The teeth which Charles Nicolas Lang had put forth some years 

 previously, for those of the hippopotamus, in his " Historia lapidum 

 figuratorum Helvetia?," printed in 1708, plate 11, figs. 1 and 2, are 

 not to be classed with the preceding : they are nothing more than 

 horses' teeth. Fig. 1 is a germ which has not as yet emerged from 

 the gum, and fig. 2 an old worn-down tooth. Lithologists have fre- 

 quently been deceived in the teeth of the horse, although they belong 

 to so common an animal. We shall see this more in detail in another 

 chapter. 



I likewise find a piece attributed to the hippopotamus in the writings 

 of an author almost of our own times, with as little appearance of truth 

 as marked the statements of Lang. It is the same cited in the cata- 

 logue of the Museum of Berlin, by Davila, vol. iii, page 221, article 296. 

 He expresses himself thus : — 



" The jaw of an hippopotamus, petrified and embedded in its matrix 

 of plaster stone found in the neighbourhood of Paris. The lower jaw 

 still preserves five or six molar teeth, with their roots partly engaged 

 in their sockets, and partly emerging from them. The upper jaw is 

 almost entirely destroyed, and offers nothing more than the impression 

 of the other molar teeth opposite to those of the lower jaw. Ths 

 latter preserve their greenish enamel, and are in other respects similar 

 to the teeth of the hippopotamus, which have been represented by 

 M. de Jussieu in the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences. This jaw 

 is a little more than six inches in length and four in breadth." 



I have quite sufficient knowledge of the fossils contained in our 

 plaster quarries, to take upon me to say that nothing belonging to the 

 hippopotamus was ever found in them : besides, five teeth of an hip- 

 popotamus must assuredly have occupied a 6pace measuring at the 

 very least eight inches in length. 



