DINOSAURS 
i6i 
London, and ransacked all the drawers in the Hunterian Museum 
that contained jaws and teeth of reptiles, but without finding 
any that threw light on this subject. Fortunately, Mr. Samuel 
Stutchbury, then a young man, was present, and proposed to 
show him the skeleton of an Iguana, which he had himself pre- 
pared from a specimen that had long been immersed in spirits. 
And now the puzzle was in a fair way to being solved; for, to 
his great delight, the doctor found that the minute teeth of that 
reptile bore a closer resemblance in their general form to those 
from Tilgate Forest than any others he had ever seen. 
In spite of this fortunate discovery, however, others remained 
obstinate and unconvinced ; and it was not until he had collected 
a series of specimens, exhibiting various stages of the teeth, that 
the correctness of his opinion was admitted, either as to their 
true interpretation, or the age of the strata in which they were 
imbedded. And now there came good news from Paris. Cuvier, 
with the fresh material submitted to him, had boldly renounced 
his previous opinion, and gave the weight of his great authority 
to the view maintained by the discoverer of these teeth. In a 
letter to the doctor he said that such teeth were quite unknown 
to him, and that they belonged to some reptile. He suggested 
that they implied the existence of a new animal, a herbivorous 
re'ptile. Time would either confirm or disprove the idea, and in 
the mean time he advised Hr. Mantell to seek diligently for 
further evidence, and, if part of a jaw could be found with 
teeth adhering, he believed he could solve the problem. In his 
immortal work, Ossemens Fossiles, Cuvier generously admits his 
former mistake, and said he was entirely convinced of his error. 
Baron Cuvier alone amongst the doctor’s friends or corre- 
spondents was able to give any hint as to the character and 
probable relations of the animal to which the recently discovered 
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