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asserted their animal origin, and pointed out the animal to which 
they conceived they had belonged. 
These fossils vary considerably in their size and form: some 
scarcely exceeding a quarter of an inch, whilst others are full five 
inches in length ; some being triangular and flat ; some long, straight, 
and conical ; and others very nearly resembling, in form, the beak of 
a bird. The great variety in their forms serves to show us, that the 
animals from which they derived their origin must have differed 
materially from each other. 
The large triangular glossopetrae, with nearly straight and finely 
jagged edges, rather an obtuse apex, and a flattish or slightly-forked 
base, appears to have belonged to an animal differing, at least in its 
magnitude, from any animal with which we are acquainted, that is 
furnished with teeth of a similar form. The specimen Plate XIX. 
Fig. 1 1 , though inferior to many in size, must have belonged to an 
enormous animal : it is four inches and a half long, and three inches 
and a half wide at its base. M. Lacepede has made some very 
ingenious calculations respecting the size of the shark to which a 
fossil tooth in the National Museum had belonged, which tooth was 
rather smaller than the one here figured ; and he concludes, that it 
could not have been less than seventy feet nine inches in length. 
These teeth have been supposed to approach the nearest in form 
to those of the white shark Squalus carcharias, Linn. ; and cal- 
culating the size of the animal, to which some of these fossil teeth 
have belonged, from the size of the teeth in the white shark of the 
present time, it cannot be doubted that some of these animals must 
have been at least an hundred feet in length. 
These teeth, from their supposed origin from these animals, have 
been named Carchariodontes. They have been also called Lamio- 
dontes, from these animals having been named Lamice , by the earlier 
naturalists. They have been found in different parts of the world ; 
but, in the greatest numbers, in Malta and the neighbouring islands. 
