20 
DE. W. KOWALEYSKT ON THE 
in our own time, what Dremothermm, Dorcatherium , Elaphotheriim, Gelocus, and so on 
really are, what are the bones belonging to each set of teeth (as the names were mostly 
given to these last), whether they had horns or were hornless like the Tragulidce , and 
so on. If we add that German authors described the genera of Paridigitates which were 
found and named in France under different names (as Palceomeryx , Microtherium , 
Hyotherium , and so on), when they came from German localities, the confusion may 
he guessed. Having no good descriptions and no figures of the genera noticed in France, 
the German authors almost necessarily fell into the mistake of renaming what was 
already named. Once named, the genus was allowed to go forth with the short and 
wholly insufficient characteristics given to it by the first describer, the impossibility of 
adding one’s name after the generic or specific designation seeming to take all interest 
from it. And this, moreover, is the best case ; for frequently the same form was 
described by another palaeontologist under a different generic name, or, if this was 
utterly impossible, a new species was made of it, founded on some difference in size or 
other trifling character. Happily, however, a reaction began to set in, one of the first 
to head it on the Continent being Putimeyer, who did not confine his study merely to 
the teeth of fossil Mammalia, but aimed with brilliant success at a complete investi- 
gation of the osteology of the extinct genera and of their affinities with the living 
ones. Gaudry’s work on the fossils of Pikenni (the best palaeontological work that has 
appeared in France since Cuvier’s ‘ Ossemens Fossiles ’), FrAx\s’s ‘ Fauna von Stein- 
heim,’ Alphonse Milne-Edwaeds’s ‘ Oiseaux Fossiles,’ and many others may be cited 
as examples to prove that the new tendency has fairly set in and will bear good fruit. 
The wide acceptance by thinking naturalists of Darwin’s theory has given a new life 
to palaeontological research ; the investigation of fossil forms has been elevated from a 
merely inquisitive study of what were deemed to be arbitrary acts of creation to a 
deep scientific investigation of forms allied naturally and in direct connexion with those 
iioav peopling the globe, and the knowledge of which will remain imperfect and incom- 
plete without a thorough knowledge of all the forms that have preceded them in the 
past history of our globe. 
The foregoing observations are intended only as a sort of apology for the somewhat 
minute osteological details into which it seemed to me necessary to enter in my descrip- 
tion of the two genera which form the subject of the present memoir ; before, however, 
we proceed to the concrete description of their skeleton, it is necessary to offer a few 
remarks on the position they hold among other fossil Paridigitata, as it seems to me 
that it has not been duly recognized by any previous author. 
In all our speculations about the history and origin of the Paridigitata, a paramount 
importance has always been ascribed to Anoplotherium , as the most ancient form of 
the Paridigitate series. Now, seeing the reduced state of the skeleton of AnojglotJierium , 
there cannot be the slightest doubt that this position is an entirely usurped one. How 
this state of things originated is easily accounted for. Anoplotlierium had the good 
fortune to be found and described by Cuvier, who gave a thoroughly good description 
