44 
ORIGINAL ARTICLES. 
purposely avoiding a geographical name, which subsequent research, 
or more extended materials, might prove to be restrictively vicious. 
I was fully impressed with the importance of the result, in prov¬ 
ing the co-existence of a distinct species of Elephant with the extinct 
Edentate Fauna of the Southern States of the Union, and as furnish¬ 
ing a probable explanation of the statements made by Humboldt, 
Cuvier, # Yon Meyer, f Blainville, and others, of Elephant remains 
occurring in Mexico, Texas, and other of the Southern States of 
North America. Early in the following year I became acquainted 
with a remarkable series of Elephantine remains, added to the collec¬ 
tion of the British Museum, by purchase, in the spring of 1847. 
They professed to be principally from the vicinity of San Eelipe, on 
the Brazos river in Texas ; and I identified a portion of them as 
being of E. Columbi. But I was prevented from following up the 
subject by my departure to India at the end of 1847, and I reserved 
it for future research. 
Soon after my return to Europe in 1855, Sir Charles Lyell, at 
my request, placed the Brunswick Canal specimens at my disposal, 
and I resumed the investigation of the fossil Elephant of the Gulf 
of Mexico. During the same year, I had an opportunity, on the in¬ 
dication of my friend M. Lartet, of examining, in the Palaeontolo¬ 
gical Gallery of the Jar din des Plantes at Paris, a small molar referred 
to by Blainville, J as having been brought by M. Le Clerc from 
Texas, which I determined to be a milk molar of the same form. In 
18561 was enabled, through the courtesy of M. Humbert, to examine, 
in the Natural History collection of the Musee Academique of Ge¬ 
neva, a series of molars of the same fossil Elephant, brought from 
Mexico by M. H. de Saussure, a grandson of the celebrated Swiss 
explorer of the Alps ; and by the kindness of my friends Mr. Charles 
Norton and Mr. Guild of Boston, I was supplied with an excellent 
cast of the Alabama molar, figured and described by Dr. Warren. § 
Early in the following year (1857) I became cognizant of the most 
perfectly preserved molar of the same form that I have yet seen. It 
was discovered in Mexico, and presented to the Museum of the Col¬ 
lege of Surgeons by Mr. Taylor. This specimen, in conjunction 
with M. Leclerc’s milk molar, supplied the means of determining the 
ridge-formula of the entire set of molars, and of fixing the exact 
serial position of the form among the Elephants. 
The whole of these materials I found to be markedly distinct 
from E. primigenius , and to partake of the characters which are ty¬ 
pified in the Georgian molars from the Brunswick Canal. But to 
place the specific distinction from the Mammoth beyond question, 
I resorted to the crucial test of sawing up the principal molar of the 
Brunswick Canal series longitudinally and vertically, in the manner 
* Oss. Foss. 4to. edit. Tom. i. p. 157. 
■{■ Leonhard and Bronn, Neues Jahrbuch 1838, p. 414 ; Idem. 1840, p. 581. 
j Osteographie. Elephants, p. 190. 
§ “The Mastodon giganteus of N. America,” 1855, p. 1G2. 
