PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES. 
87 
PHILOMATHIC SOCIETY OF PARIS. 
M. Bazin called the attention of the Society to many nervous anastomoses 
which he had noticed in his memoir at the Academy of Sciences, especially those 
of the auditory and superficial petrous with the seventh pair, and that of the 
chorda tympani , with a new gangliform plexus, observed in Man on the internal 
surface of the inferior maxillary nerve, and which he names the inferior maxillary 
ganglion. This ganglion, as well as that of Arnold, called the optic ganglion, 
and some other smaller ones with which it communicates, belongs, according to 
Bazin, to vegetative life, principally to the circulation, and has scarcely any con¬ 
nexion with the organs of sense. 
M. Audouin communicated a letter he had received from M„ Lund, respecting 
fossil animals found in the Brazils. 
M. Constant Prevqst observed that it was greatly to be desired, that while 
M. Lund made known so many new fossil animals, he should also inform us 
whether the circumstances, as to the deposits, are the same as in Europe. All 
geologists were not of the same opinion as to the nature of these deposits. Many 
thought that the ossiferous caverns of France, England, and Franconia, had served 
as habitations for Bears, Hyeenas, and other great Carnivorous animals, of which 
the remains are found mixed with those of Herbivorous ones which had been 
made their prey. This opinion was founded on the presence in certain caverns 
of gnawed bones, and the solid excrements of Carnivorous animals. Nevertheless, 
the forms of these caverns—the difference in level of the chamber,—the great 
number of bones,—the mixture of bones of large and small terrestrial animals, 
with those of fishes, and with fresh-water and even marine shells,—the stratifi¬ 
cation of the whole in mud or gravel containing rolled pebbles,—the heaping-up, 
even to the roof, of the deposit in some places,—the filling of cavities commu¬ 
nicating externally, with the same material,—and the existence of the deposits 
of the same nature on the surface—all lead to the conclusion, that the caverns. 
* * 
now dry, were submerged at the period when the animals whose bones are 
contained in them were living. They were abysses into which the waters, 
fluviatile, lacustrine, or oceanic, carried or engulphed animals, dead or alive, 
which could not resist the force of the current. The sinking of a great many 
rivers—the Rhone, for example—might lead to similar accumulations of mud 
and bones in the caverns through which the waters were transmitted. Sudden 
overflowings, by the rupture of dykes or basins, might create temporary inunda¬ 
tions, causing the accumulation of the bodies of animals in such places. He did 
not deny that these caverns might have been the haunts of Carnivorous animals 
subsequent to these depositions, which, if preserved, would not be found in the 
more ancient sedimentary deposits. 
