560 
PEOFESSOE OWEN ON FOSSIL EEMAINS OF EQUINES 
of Fossil Organic Remains in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons,’ vol. i. 
54 Mammalia and Birds,” 4to, 1845, p. 235. 
It is unlikely — seeing the avidity with which the Indians of the Pampas have seized 
and subjugated the stray descendants of 4he European horses introduced by the Disco- 
verers and 4 Conquistadors ’ of South America, and the able use those nomad natives 
make of the multitudinous progeny of the Spanish war-horses at the present day — that 
any such tameable Equine should have been killed off or extirpated by the ancestors of 
the South- American aborigines. The circumstances of the discovery and the fact of the 
extinction in South America of a species of Horse would point to some other cause than 
that of the hostility of man to so useful an animal ; and we might then in like manner 
give the benefit of such doubt as to extinction by human means to the contemporaries 
of the Eguus curvidens, viz. Megatherium , Toxodon , Macrauclienia , Glyjptodon, &c. 
I am now able to adduce other evidences confirmatory of the distinctive characters of 
Eguus curvidens from all known Equines, recent and fossil, of the Old TV orld of geo- 
graphers, and at the same time to extend the geographical distribution, in the New 
World, of this or a nearly allied species to Brazil and to Central America, in a direction 
toward the locality where Leidy has indicated its remains *. 
With regard to fossil evidences of the Horse-kind in Brazil, we are mainly indebted 
to the persevering researches of that excellent naturalist, Dr. P. W. Lund, who devoted 
the last few years of his life, spent on account of failing health in Brazil, to a most 
valuable and instructive investigation of the limestone caverns in the interior Highlands 
of that country. In a letter dated “ Lagoa Santa, 4th October, 1841,” Dr. Lund commu- 
nicated to the Royal Academy of Sciences, Copenhagen, a continuation of his Account 
of the Limestone Caves in the Interior of the Highlands of Brazil, in which, among 
the contents of the Cave B, Lapa do Bahu, appears “No. 16, Eguus neogceus,” (IV.) 
vol. xi. (1845) p. 76f. No other notice of the Equine fossils or of the character of the 
extinct species appears in this communication. In a subsequent letter, dated “ Lagoa 
Santa, 22nd November, 1844,” Dr. Lund gave results of later researches in those caves, 
which were published with plates in (IV.) 1846, vol. xii. p. 59. In this letter the 
genus Scelidotherium is cited, and in the ‘ Summary of the fossils from cursory inspection’ 
(p. 86) there appears “ No. 17, Eguus aff. cabatto .” 
Of this he proceeds to say that “ the greater part of the skeleton of a young indi- 
* Dr. Leidy notices some fossil Equine teeth as showing characters of Equm curvidens which had been dis- 
covered in upper tertiary deposits in Kentucky, North America : see ‘ Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences 
of Philadelphia,’ September 1847, p. 262. Dr. Burmeister refers to the same species some teeth from the 
“ laguna Siasgo of the Eio Salado, Buenos Ayres,” in the ‘ Anales del Museo Publico de Buenos Ayres,’ 4to, 1867, 
p. 245, pi. xiii. 
f The Eoman numeral (IV.) indicates, in this Paper, the work entitled “Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes 
Selskabs Natur. og Mathematiske Afhandlinger.” The previous communications by Dr. Lund on this subject 
to the Danish Academy were translated by the Eev. W. Biltoh, M.A., and published under the title “ View of 
the Fauna of Brazil, previous to the last Geological Devolution,” in the ‘Magazine of Natural History,’ New 
Series, 1840, p. 1. Up to that date he appears not to have met with Equine remains in the Brazilian caves. 
